Whatever you find to do with your hands, do it with all your might, because there is neither work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, the place where you will eventually go.

Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted! Issue your orders, but they will not be executed! For God is with us!

(Mem) Whose command was ever fulfilled unless the Lord decreed it?

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I often intended to come to you (and was prevented until now), so that I may have some fruit even among you, just as I already have among the rest of the Gentiles.

And with this confidence I intended to come to you first so that you would get a second opportunity to see us,

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that town and spend a year there and do business and make a profit."

General references

So I began to despair about all the fruit of my labor for which I worked so hard on earth.

"I thought, 'In the middle of my life I must walk through the gates of Sheol, I am deprived of the rest of my years.'