Occupation alone is happiness. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Absence of occupation is not rest; [ William Cowper ]
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. [ William Cowper ]
Nature fits all her children with something to do. [ Lowell ]
Occupation is the necessary basis of all enjoyment. [ Leigh Hunt ]
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable. [ Landor ]
The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality. [ Fuseli ]
To business that we love, we rise betimes and go to it with delight. [ William Shakespeare ]
The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude. [ Rousseau ]
Blessed is that man who knows his own distaff and has found his own spindle. [ J. G. Holland ]
Every base occupation makes one sharp in its practice and dull in every other. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
No woman or man need ever suffer from ennui or despair; the panacea is occupation. [ Mme. de Surin ]
If every man works at that for which nature fitted him, the cows will be well tended. [ La Fontaine ]
Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter. [ Horace Mann ]
Nature had made occupation a necessity; society makes it a duty; habit may make it a pleasure. [ Capelle ]
Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign. [ Napoleon I ]
O God, impress upon me the value of time, and give regulation to all my thoughts and to all my movements. [ Chalmers ]
The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of Work. [ Anthony Trollope ]
The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. [ Schiller ]
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose. Labor is life. [ Carlyle ]
Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value; for it is the representative of eternity. [ Goethe ]
Literature happens to be the only occupation in which wages are not given in proportion to the goodness of the work done. [ Froude ]
We must strive to make ourselves really worthy of some employment. We need pay no attention to anything else; the rest is the business of others. [ Bruyere ]
Employment, which Galen calls nature's physician,
is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery. [ Burton ]
Academical years ought by rights to give occupation to the whole mind. It is this time which, well or ill employed, affects a man's whole after-life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Cheerfulness is the daughter of employment; and I have known a man come home in high spirits from a funeral, merely because he has had the management of it. [ Dr. Horne ]
I believe one reason why women are generally so much more cheerful than men is because they can work with the needle, and so endlessly vary their employment. [ Sydney Smith ]
Here, in the country, my books are my sole occupation: books my sure solace, and refuge from frivolous cares. Books the calmers, as well as the instruction of the mind. [ Mrs. Inchbald ]
The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now, if I were a grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs. [ Emerson ]
Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; and before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty. [ H. W. Beecher ]
We protract the career of time by employment, we lengthen the duration of our lives by wise thoughts and useful actions. Life to him who wishes not to have lived in vain is thought and action. [ Zimmermann ]
No amount of preaching, exhortation, sympathy, benevolence, will render the condition of our working women what it should be. so long as the kitchen and needle are substantially their only resources. [ Horace Greeley ]
It is observed at sea that men are never so much disposed to grumble and mutiny as when least employed. Hence an old captain, when there was nothing else to do, would issue the order to scour the anchor.
[ Samuel Smiles ]
The secret of happiness lies in the health of the whole mind, and in giving to each faculty due occupation, and in the natural order of their superiorities, the Divine first, the human second, the material last. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Give us the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he will be equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time; he will do it better; he will persevere longer. [ Carlyle ]