Hard work

“ Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. ”

“ I am a very hard worker myself, and I am not speaking without knowing what I am talking about, and I say from my own experience—and I have worked ever since I reached my sixteenth year—that work is happiness. ”

“ One may always get out of hard work the satisfaction which comes from the consciousness of an honest endeavour to do an honest piece of work; but the work which inspires rather than exhausts, and the doing of which gives the hand more freedom and power for the next tasks must be penetrated, suffused, and shaped by the imagination. The great lawyer, physician, electrician, teacher, and builder must give his work largeness, completeness, and nobility of structure by the use of the imagination in as real and true a sense as the great poet or painter. ”

“ Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work. ”

“ Again, the character of the stimulus that induces hard work differs greatly in different persons; it may be wealth, ambition, or other object of passion. The solitary hard workers, under no encouragement or compulsion except their sense of duty to their generation, are unfortunately still rare among us. ”

“ And the question has to be looked at all round. Hard work there must be for everybody, and the choice you have to make now is whether it shall be hands and muscles that shall be set to work, or brains. ”

“ Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work. ”

“ It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of the golf course. ”

“ A person of my position is never useful. We have certain accomplishments, and that is more than sufficient. I have no sympathy myself with industry of any kind, least of all with such industries as you seem to recommend. Indeed, I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do. ”

“ He who does most and does it well, becomes most. Horatius received as much land as he could plow around in a day. And you and I get each day just as much as, by putting our hand to the plow of activity, we are able to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. ”

“ It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. ”

“ It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life. ”

“ This Labor Day, we are reminded that we didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness. We did it by rewarding hard work and responsibility. We did it by recognizing that we rise or we fall together as one nation – one people – all of us vested in one another. That is how we have succeeded in the past. And that is how we will not only rebuild this economy, but rebuild it stronger than ever before. ”

“ Some of us in this world must do the heavy work. Some hands must be knotted, some backs bent with labor, some brows furrowed with wind and weather and the hard realities of life; but in return the laborers gain the strength of the wind-tossed oak and the patience of the ages. ”

“ And yet there are so many kinds of work, and hard work too, that we can do on earth, that it seems as though we could never get to the end of them. There are, for instance, home work, warfare work, praying work, and a great many other kinds of work, of which it would take too long to speak now. ”

“ Our job is to reverse those trends. It’s time to restore opportunity for all people – the idea that no matter who you are, if you work hard and live up to your responsibilities, you can make it if you try. ”

“ And in exchange you enter a life where there is much long hard work of the hands—work that is really hard and long, so that no man paid to labor would consider it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety ”

“ If you are willing to work your mind into the shape you want it, you will surely bring yourself to the front among active, ingenious and successful men. But this means hard work, and work all the time. ”

“ Will the world stop swinging in its orbit if I don't meet just so many people a day, write so many letters, hear so many lectures, skim through so many books? Of course if I'm earning my living I must work for it and work not only honestly but hard. ”

“ This does not mean that new openings come every day and in groups. Not at all. They come only after hard work; it is the fellow who can stand the gaff of routine and still keep himself alive and alert who finally gets into direction. ”

“ If an employer urges men to do their best, and the men learn after a while that their best does not bring any reward, then they naturally drop back into "getting by." But if they see the fruits of hard work in their pay envelope—proof that harder work means higher pay—then also they begin to learn that they are a part of the business, and that its success depends on them and their success depends on it. ”

“ Our work is hard labor, and we gain no [234] enjoyment in the use of our mental powers; for the enjoyment of any activity is proportional to the height and glory of the purpose for which it is employed. ”

“ All of us, at times anyhow, get out of as much work as we can. We even use the word work and its synonyms loosely and indolently. Perhaps this is a literary aspect of the labor problem. If, however, we can shake off our sluggishness and exert ourselves in discriminating our terms, we shall use work as a general word for effort, physical or mental, to some purposive end; labor for hard, physical work ”

“ Those who work much do not work hard. ”

“ To know every detail, to gain an insight into every secret, to learn every method, to secure every kind of skill, are the prime necessities of success in any art, craft, or trade. No time is too long, no study too hard, no discipline too severe for the attainment of complete familiarity with one's work and complete ease and skill in the doing of it. As a man values his working life, he must be willing to pay the highest price of success in it,—the price which severe training exacts. ”

“ And with steelworkers in Pittsburgh, and retail workers in Maryland, I laid out part four: making sure hard work pays off for men and women, with wages you can live on, savings you can retire on, and health insurance that’s there for you when you need it. ”

“ Not only follow up success, but learn to do the difficult things; there will always be a throng seeking to do the easy things,—things which require the maximum of muscle and the minimum of brains. Why do such multitudes seek this hard, easy work? ”

“ Millions of our neighbors have been swept up in the worst recession in our lifetimes. And long before this recession hit, the middle class had been taking some hard shots. Long before this recession, the values of hard work and responsibility that built this country had been given short shrift. ”

“ [8]
¶Among ourselves we differ in many qualities, of body, head, and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as well as physically. But each of us has the right to ask that he shall be protected from wrong-doing as he does his work and carries his burden through life. No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing; ”

“ If the standard of life’s ordinary action should be the precept “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,” with what intensified force does it apply to the writing of history! Pains, infinite pains, are the requisites for good{49} work. Nothing meritorious is ever accomplished without hard labor. ”

“ And also I noticed a tendency among many men in business to feel that their lot was hard—they worked against a day when they might retire and live on an income—get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle to be ended as soon as possible. ”

“ Very seldom, and only by hard struggles does your hard worker or your real inventor reap riches from his endeavors, regardless of the ability, inventiveness, industry, and earning capacity of your individual. ”

“ If you now are going to work, to study in order to win a reward, then the work will seem hard to you; ”

“ None of the men work too hard. The wages settle nine tenths of the mental problems and construction gets rid of the others. We have then to guard against unsuitable clothing, carelessness, and ignorance, and to make everything we have fool-proof. ”

“ Every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. The man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings. These are his by right. But no one deserves ease until after his work is done. ”

“ Marie’s view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by somebody’s work, that just “Being a Good Woman” or “Being a Decent Fellow” is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:—that the former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing. ”

“ It is an immense map of the occupational world for educated women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and hill, is drawn to scale, from poultry farming to department-store buying, from lunch-room management to organized child-saving.
We here see the educational system, at its college academic level, moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put them into it, finding it. ”

“ We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life. Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. ”

“ Growth into General Culture takes longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a specialized technique. The high-school teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him. ”

“ The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil ”

“ On the other hand, we see the hobo who won’t work ruining himself on the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won’t work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and of game preserves. ”

“ They have perceived, to some extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and their daily work on the other.
To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, “Secretarial 46 Studies” in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her French, her sociology, and her history, as well as throughout her typewriting, her shorthand, and her commercial law, has necessarily kept in view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her future working career. ”

“ Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty of work is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose healthy action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of labour is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high mental culture. ”

“ Arise and labour ere the time of reckoning, Ere the long shadows and the night draw night. Wherefore idle?—Swing the sickle stoutly! Bind thy rich sheaves exultingly and fast! Nothing dismayed, do thy great task devoutly— Patient and strong, and hopeful to the last! Wherefore idle?—Labour, not inaction, Is the soul's birthright, and its truest rest; Up to thy work!—It is Nature's fit exaction— He who toils humblest, bravest, toils the best. ”

“ A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a long technique to master instead of a short one,—for all this part of the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining part of it we may thank System.
The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of 64 people. ”

“ Bryn Mawr is willing to train girls not only to be cultivated but to secure good positions, as teachers.
But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply. Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the market. ”