Endless Toil Quotes

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.

It’s not that the actual suffering is so great—though it’s bad enough—but the men seem such big helpless children, and the women so impersonal—little Atlases under a load they know will crush them out at last, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t conscious any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill.

A gardener's work is never at an end; it begins with the year and continues to the next.

For now indeed is the race of iron; and men never cease from labour and sorrow by day and from perishing by night.

None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me tobe doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.