Sourced

• One of the best maxims in determining our course in life is, to select, at the outset, that in which virtue and principle will be least likely to be put to a test, and in which, from the nature of the calling, a man may bring around him such associations and influences as will be an auxiliary in keeping him in the path of virtue.
  • Albert Barnes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 437.

Unsourced

• "The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him."
  • Jacob Appel, playwright, Arborophilia (2005)

• "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

• "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

• "Employers prefer to take honest people because honest people don’t take."
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• "Employment, which Galen calls "nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness, that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery."
  • Burton

• "Indolence is stagnation; employment is life."
  • Seneca

• '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

• "Life will frequently languish, even in the hands of the busy, if they have not some employment subsidiary to that which forms their main pursuit."
  • Blair

• "Occupation alone is happiness."
  • Dr. Johnson

• "One only "right" we have to assert in common with mankind—and that is as much in our hands as theirs—is the right of having something to do."
  • Miss Mulock

• "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

• "The devil does not tempt people whom he finds suitably employed."
  • Jeremy Taylor

• "The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty."
  • Schiller

• "The rust rots the steel which use preserves."
  • Lytton