LABOR DAY
Tomorrow is Labor Day, I suppose set by an act of Congress. How Congress knew anything about labor is beyond me.
—Will Rogers
LAUGHTER
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
—Victor Borge
A retired surgeon said to me on a plane, “I’ve practiced medicine for fifty-eight years and I’ve never known a person to die from laughter.”
—Roy B. Zuck
The day has never dawned that I couldn’t find something to laugh at.
—Flannery O’Connor
We don’t stop laughing because we get old. We get old because we stop laughing.
Make it a point to indulge in at least one hearty laugh every day. If nothing funnier comes along, laugh at yourself.
Man is the only creature endowed with laughter. And he is the only creature that deserves to be laughed at.
—Philip Chesterfield
Few people realize that health actually varies according to the amount of laughter. So does recovery. People who laugh actually live longer than those who do not laugh.
—James J. Walsh
The wife of a drunkard once found her husband in a filthy condition, with torn clothes, matted hair, bruised face, asleep in the kitchen, having come home from a drunken revel. She sent for a photographer, had a picture of him in all his wretched appearance, and placed it on the mantel beside another picture taken at the time of his marriage, which showed him handsome and well dressed. When he became sober, he saw the two pictures and awakened to a consciousness of his condition, from which he arose to a better life. The purpose of the Law is not to save people, but to show them their true condition compared with the divine standard.
If laughter could be ordered at the corner drugstore, any doctor would prescribe many laughs every day. A dose of laughter is a combination of stimuli like that of vitamin tablets plus the relaxation of bromides. Laughter is exercise for the diaphragm, which is neglected in most exercises except deep breathing. If you could x-ray yourself when you laugh, you would see astonishing results. Your diaphragm goes down, and your lungs expand. You are taking in more oxygen than usual. A surge of power runs from head to toes.
During the dark days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln confided to a friend, “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.”
Laughter translates into any language.
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello once took out a hundred thousand dollar insurance policy with Lloyds of London that stipulated payment if any of their audience should die of laughter.
—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
LAW
When you are cooking a roast in the oven, if it is done, you try to pick it out with a fork, but find you are unable to do so. This is like the Mosaic law. It is unable to pick us up out of sin.
Then you find that you are able to get the roast out only if you place a pan under the roast and lift it out in this manner. This is grace. It gets under us and lifts us out of the bondage of sin.
The law brings out sin; grace covers it. The law wounds; the Gospel heals. One is a quiver of arrows; the other a cruise of oil.
—D. L. Moody
LAWYER
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
—Robert Frost
Two farmers began to fight over the ownership of a cow. One began to pull from the head and the other from the tail. While they were doing this, a third came and began to milk the cow. He happened to be a lawyer.
—Pulpit Helps
LAYPEOPLE
Leave it only to the ministers, and soon the church will die;
Leave it to the womenfolk—the young will pass it by.
For the church is all that lifts us from the coarse and selfish mob,
And the church that is to prosper needs the laymen on the job.
Now, a layman has his business, and a layman has his joys,
But he also has the training of his little girls and boys;
And I wonder how he’d like it if there were no churches here,
And he had to raise his children in a godless atmosphere.
It’s the church’s special function to uphold the finer things,
To teach that way of living from which all that’s noble springs;
But the minister can’t do it singlehanded and alone,
For the laymen of the country are the church’s buildingstones.
When you see a church that’s empty, though its doors are open wide.
It’s not the church that’s dying—it’s the laymen who have died;
It’s not just by song or sermon that the church’s work is done,
It’s the laymen of the country who for God must carry on.
—Edgar A. Guest
LAZINESS
A lazy maid was once asked, “Don’t you do anything fast?”
“Yes, I get tired fast.”
It is better to be bent by hard work than to be crooked by trying to avoid it.
A lazy, chronically unemployed man was asked, “How are things going?” He said, “Things are tough. I sleep at night fairly well, and in the morning I can make it, but in the afternoons I just toss and turn.”
A student once wrote to the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, asking him how to obtain “an easy job.” Mr. Beecher replied, “If that’s your attitude, you’ll never amount to anything. You cannot be an editor or become a lawyer or think of entering the ministry. None of these professions is easy. You will have to forget the fields of merchandising and shipping, abhor the practice of politics, and forget about the difficult field of medicine. To be a farmer or even a good soldier, you must study and think. My son, you have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is in the grave.”
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
—Edmund Burke
If the Devil catches a man idle, he will set him to work.
God will not do for you what He has given you strength to do for yourself.
—Bob Jones
If you want to kill time, try working it to death.
He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.
The Bible promises no loaves to the loafer.
A lot of people who spout so profusely about capital and labor never had any capital and never did any labor.
Some people use Christianity like a bus; they ride on it only when it is going their way.
Easy come, easy go, but not so easy when it’s gone.
We’ll never leave any footprints in the sands of time by sitting down.
The lazier a man is, the more he is going to do tomorrow.
—Norwegian proverb
Good luck is a lazy man’s estimate of a worker’s success.
I like the word indolence. It makes my laziness seem classy.
—Bern Williams
Poverty of purpose is worse than poverty of purse.
An old mountaineer and his wife were sitting in front of the fireplace one evening just whiling away the time.
After a long silence the wife said: “Jed, I think it’s raining. Get up and go outside and see.”
The old mountaineer continued to gaze into the fire for a second, sighed, then said, “Aw, Ma, why don’t we just call in the dog and see if he’s wet.”
Be ashamed to find yourself idle.
No one is so tired as the one who does nothing.
There are but a few men who have character enough to live a life of idleness.
—Josh Billings