Intellecual labor

“ And, standing on this doleful experience, these people have endeavored to reverse the natural sentiments of mankind, and to pronounce labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a man to consist in eating the fruit of other men’s labor. Labor: a man coins himself into his labor; turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. ”

“ Who would honor obtain, With the sweat and the pain, The praise that man gives to the master must buy.— But the blessing withal must descend from on high! And well an earnest word beseems The work the earnest hand prepares; Its load more light the labor deems, When sweet discourse the labor shares. So let us ponder—nor in vain— What strength can work when labor wills; For who would not the fool disdain Who ne'er designs what he fulfils? And well it stamps our human race, And hence the gift to understand, That man within the heart should trace Whate'er he fashions with the hand. ”

“ Labor! labor! labor! physical, mental and spiritual labor!
Labor, therefore, is the fulcrum of the great lever of progress, lifting humanity from the material up to the spiritual realm. One short century ago nearly all physical labor was performed by the hands of man. Since then the mind has come up to the work, and rescued the body from the laborious servitude of former times; and now a single mind, directing a single machine, produces an hundred-fold more than it could when acting through its own personal machine. ”

“ Certainly, right thinking naturally impels people to work.
We learned no theories about "the dignity of labor," but we were taught to work almost as if it were a religion; to keep at work, expecting nothing else. ”

“ His labor is to build up, not to destroy; to gather together, not to scatter abroad; to take the ignorant and lead them to wisdom; to pick up the poor and bring them to comfortable circumstances. This is our labor—what we have to do. ”

“ The common and rude experience of men, laboring without thinking about their labor, teaches these things, and the very beginnings of the art and science of Intellectual Economy come beyond and after these.
What shall we say of those moods which every student passes through, which turn and return upon the mind, irresistible and mysterious? What are the causes of those strange and delightful exaltations of mind in which thought runs like a clock when the pendulum is off, and crowds a week of existence into an hour of time? ”

“ When we contemplate these achievements of mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely, with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty! ”

“ You have preached that all wealth is the result of labor, but now you have realised that intelligent supervision is required to make labor effective, and that brains are just as necessary to the world's prosperity as is manual toil. ”

“ They are very largely the result of the labor and the skill of generations that have preceded me, that have built up in me this brain, this skill, this power of application. The products of my labor would indeed belong to me if my labor were really mine, if it were not to an incalculable extent the consequent of social antecedents, in regard to which I can not claim the least merit. The attempt to found the rewards of labor upon the merit of the laborer seems to me a perfectly hopeless one. ”

“ There was no secret of labor which they disdained.
They accepted the divine ordination that man is for use; that intelligent being exists to the utmost use; and that his ruin is to live for pleasure and for show. ”

“ As an outpost of intelligence, of good will, of enlightenment, the intellectual can render an invisible but a difficult and highly useful service. It is here, perhaps, that the majority of intellectuals with an interest in the labor movement will find their true function. ”

“ It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. ”

“ The law of labor is equally binding on genius and mediocrity. The mind and body rarely visit this earth of ours so exactly fitted to each other, and so perfectly harmonizing together, as to rise without effort, and command in the affairs of men. ”

“ Nor is labor, the penalty for sin, a punishment merely, but a divine means of reformation. It is, therefore, a moral discipline that all should submit to; and especially is it a means by which the youth here are to be prepared for the duties of life. But industry is not only near to all the virtues; it is itself a virtue, as idleness is a vice. The word labor is, of course, used in the broadest signification. Labor is any honest employment, or use of the head or hands, which brings good to ourselves, and consequently, though indirectly, brings good to our fellow-men. ”

“ The mass which men speak casually of as “labor” is an aggregation of individuals, each with his human ties and prejudices and his congenital weaknesses and strength, and each with his own salvation to work out through difficulties without and within that are little understood from the outside. ”

“ There every object has a pleasing history. There industry has accumulated its fruits, frugality its comforts, and virtue diffused its contentment. The care that is taken of it tells you how hard it had been to come by. You read in it a little tale of the labor, the self-denial expended on its acquisition; it is a revelation of an inner life which you are the better for contemplating and for sympathizing with. ”

“ To put aside our personality and follow the path of renunciation and self-abegnation should be our rule of life. Now, the action in which this idea clothes itself, that in which it takes form, is labor, the secular task that unites all generations of men and makes of the universe a completed harmony, a single being accomplishing a single work. ”

“ On the other hand, we need a new statement of ethics in general. The philosopher, who is going to do it, will have to get much of his material from the labor movement and will in turn render a profound service to it. ”

“ For men who regard labor as the substance and the joy of life, the basis, the foundation of life will always be the struggle with nature,—labor both agricultural and mechanical, and intellectual, and the establishment of communion between men. Departure from one or from many of these varieties of labor, and the adoption of special labor, will then only occur when the man possessed of a special branch, and loving this work, and knowing that he can perform it better than others, sacrifices his own profit for the satisfaction of the direct demands made upon him. ”

“ In this busy world there is honest work for every man to perform. Civilization has multiplied human wants and also developed the ingenuity necessary to gratify them. But it requires labor. Not such, however, as was performed by the slave, but skilled labor—labor where the hand is guided by an intellect, quickened by the agency of class-room and laboratory for the task assigned; labor, such as will reflect credit upon and elevate a gentleman. ”

“ Labor is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that ”

“ The use of science and philosophy by the ruling class as a pretence for the appropriation of the lion’s share of the wealth produced by labor does not prove that workingmen should abandon philosophy as useless to their cause. ”

“ Senses and faculties have been bestowed upon us, to be devoted to the service of the general good; so that we, distinguished above all other forms of life for perceptiveness and reason, should labor at all times and along all lines, whether the occasion be great or small, ordinary or extraordinary, until all mankind are safely gathered into the impregnable stronghold of knowledge. ”

“ He brought to the solution of the question of labor in this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every sense that work had made clear and true. ”

“ The field of labor is ever expanding before him, reminding him that he has yet more to learn; teaching him that he is nothing more than a child in knowledge, and inviting him onward with a thousand varied charms. ”

“ The right way is, to show by actual practice that thought is useful to labor, that without thought its positive aims cannot be achieved, and that there are men in the world of thought who are willing to devote their energies to helping labor in its struggle. ”

“ And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man’s capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor ”

“ Now it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. ”

“ If the main effort is that of the intellect in planning, inventing, contriving ways and means, or in remembering, counting or thinking of any kind, it is just as truly labor, but mental. If the chief exertion is in the good will that resists temptations, guards interests, controls violence and folly, secures order and devises liberal things for society, the labor is moral. Moral labor is often recognized in wages, faithfulness being more important in some services than in others, and paid for. Mechanical devices for promoting honesty or watchfulness may save, in part, moral labor. ”

“ To reason the matter, they will readily admit that labor exclusively manual having no share in the exercise of the mental faculties, cannot be considered to give sufficient occupation to an intelligent being; since the imagination would be left to the mercy of its caprices and the heart to the whims of its desires, which is not worthy of a being created to the image and likeness of God, who commands us to labor as He labored, namely: with mind and heart constantly supplying useful thoughts to the one and noble sentiments to the other. ”

“ So that, if we set against the question as to the reality of the progress attained by the arts and sciences, not our own rapture, but that standard upon the basis of which the division of labor is defended,—the good of the laboring man,—we shall see that we have no firm foundations for that self-satisfaction in which we are so fond of indulging. ”

“ This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks—another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way. ”

“ Meanwhile the Creator, who is the greatest of levelers, has given to every human being both a physical system, needing to be kept in order by physical labor, and an intellectual or brain power, needing to be kept in order by brain labor. Work, use, employment, is the condition of health in both; and he who works either to the neglect of the other lives but a half-life, and is an imperfect human being. ”

“ He believed in the truth, too little recognized among brain-workers, that men can develop themselves into splendid mental conditions, wherein they can accomplish almost double their ordinary amount of labor. ”

“ I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. ”

“ This and similar appeals made before and since, and, most of all, the great, crying need of the times have, during the last hundred years, irresistibly aligned men and women of keen mind and fine idealism on the side of labor. ”

“ The intellectual, then, may expect of the labor movement a real significance in spite of all disappointments, and he may also expect of it, as of all significant institutions rooted in history, a tough fabric of custom and behavior to which the only fruitful approach is one of inquiring respect. ”

“ This fact sums up the whole socialistic philosophy: to gradually train the workingman to justice, encourage him to labor, lift him to the sublimity of devotion, by increase of wages, profit-sharing, distinctions, and rewards. ”

“ Labor of every sort is dignified. All living laborers who work with their hands and minds, truly earning, living in love and according to the laws of social order and progress, will become the pure and perfected leaders of truth. ”