Work

“ 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. ”

“ Just as soon as you begin to think of that which you are producing, about the results of your labour, just as soon as you begin to modify it in accordance with its results—your work becomes confused and ceases, and there comes the consciousness of the vanity of life. The master of life gave to each one of us separately such a labour, that the fulfilment of that labour is the most fruitful work. ”

“ The degree in which a man individualises his work and gives it the quality of his own mind and spirit is, therefore, the measure of his success in giving his nature free and full expression. For work, in this large sense, is the expression of the man; and as the range and significance of all kinds of expression depend upon the scope and meaning of the ideas, forces, skills, and qualities expressed, so the dignity and permanence of work depend upon the power and insight of the worker. ”

“ Work, legitimate work, was the source of all wealth. That was to say, whether it was a sack of potatoes, a grand piano, or a seven-passenger touring car, it came into being only by the performance of work. ”

“ I do not mean work in the sense of bread,—I mean work in the sense of mental interest; for those who either are placed above the necessity of labour for their bread, or who will not work although they should. ”

“ There is a question which everyone should ask herself about her work: "Is the work that I am doing adding anything to the wealth and well-being of the world? Is it necessary work—that is, is any one single person dependent to any extent for his or her existence on what I do?" ”

“ All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble: be that here said and asserted once more. ”

“ Thought may well be ever ranging,
And opinion ever changing,
Task-work be, though ill begun,
Dealt with by experience better;
By the law and by the letter
Duty done is duty done:
Do it, Time is on the wing! ”

“ Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power. ”

“ Sound work, clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally. ”

“ I have never regarded cooking in the light of mere manual labor. Labor, it seems to me, is work that is distasteful and only performed from necessity; a “labor of love” seems to me to be a paradox. Work, on the contrary, may be as keen a source of pleasure as recreation. Work may be the striving of an artist to attain his ideal. The very word “labor” suggests pain and exhaustion.9 We speak of an author’s “works,” but who would think of referring to them as his “labors”? ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; a chasm to leap into, like Curtius, horse and foot; a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy. ”

“ How to read, write, and figure is but the introduction to the larger part of the work, which taught one to write letters, wills, deeds, and all legal forms, to measure, survey, and navigate, to build houses, to make ink and cider, and to plant and graft, how to address letters to people of quality, how to doctor the sick, and, finally, how to conduct one’s self in company. ”

“ In the alertness of attention, the full activity of every faculty, the glow of the imagination, which accompany the putting forth of the creative power, the whole force of the worker is concentrated and his whole nature is under the highest tension. Everything he holds of knowledge, skill, experience, emotion flows to one point ”

“ All great work is ordered work; and in producing it the faculties must be exercised harmoniously and with order. True inspiration, therefore, should not be caricatured into a flushed and dishevelled thing. Labour always precedes it. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Let anybody observe the conversation in good society for an hour or two, and hear the tone in which servant-girls, seamstresses, mechanics, and all who work for their living, are sometimes mentioned, and he will see, that, while every one of the speakers professes to regard useful labor as respectable, she is yet deeply imbued with the leaven of aristocratic ideas. ”

“ If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.” ”

“ The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. ”

“ The wiser man, the labourer, begins at his corner of the wood, and makes out a task for himself for each day. Let not our imaginations be employed on one side only. Think, that large as may appear the work to be done—so too the result of any endeavour, however small in itself, may be of infinite extent in the future. ”

“ As I grew into young manhood, and went into business, I found on every hand that quantity counted for more than quality. The emphasis was almost always placed on how much work one could do in a day, rather than upon how well the work was done. ”

“ At this hour, men of thought, intellectual workers, laid aside the weightier labors of their profession to indulge in an exhilarating contention of wits, so much happier than other workers, in that their recreations do not retard, but rather accelerate their work. ”

“ I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself. ”

“ The craftsman, the artist, the scientist, the professional man, and to some extent the business man make new experience the basis of organized activity, of work, and produce thereby social values. The division of labor which removes the problematical from the various operations of the work makes the task totally unstimulating. ”

“ Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business in the green fields, and the town—
To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! ”

“ Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; ”

“ Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. ”

“ 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 labor is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high mental culture. ”

“ Work is the outcome of effort; fruit, of life. ”

“ If my mind has been at work as I watch this man for an hour, with his heavy rough staves made by hand, his tools and machines, his skill and strong muscular action, the amount and profit of his labor, that man's work has gone deep [Pg 18] into my whole being. I can almost live his life in an hour's time, and feel its contact with the acute problems of our modern industrial life. That is a kind of knowledge and experience worth fully as much as a sermon in Trinity Church or a University lecture.
The teacher needs a great store of these concrete facts and illustrations. ”

“ There are, of course, in every calling, those who go about the work of the day before them, doing it according to the rules of their craft, and asking no questions of the past or of the future, or of the aim and end to which their special labor is contributing. ”

“ In any work there is possible, first, more or less of the workman's interest—an interest not merely in a conventional standard of excellence in the finished result but also in betterment of the standard and in a corresponding heightened excellence of technique and spirit in the execution.49 These interests, without reference to the useful result and "for their own sake" (i.e., for the workman's sake, in ways not specifiable in advance) , may command a share of one's available time, strength, and resources. ”

“ I know not how to offer you specific advice respecting this important matter, and fortunately I think it is not needed; for all general knowledge expands the mind, clears it of prejudice, and qualifies it for application to any particular subject; and where the field is so wide, and the labour required so vast and diversified, each labourer must select that style of work which he finds most congenial to his taste and best suited to his powers. ”

“ Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. ”

“ I've turned my 'and to most, an' turned it good, In various situations round the world — For 'im that doth not work must surely die; But that's no reason man should labour all 'Is life on one same shift; ”

“ 'Work,' it saith to man, 'in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. ”

“ The conclusion of a new volume of a work, involving so much care, labour and responsibility, as are necessarily attached, at the present day, to a Journal of Science and the Arts, naturally produces in the mind, a state of not ungrateful calmness, and a disposition, partaking of social feeling, to say something to those who honour such a production, by giving to it a small share of their money, and of their time. ”

“ Even though these labours had been nothing more than an attempt on man's part to penetrate the workshop of nature and ascertain the hidden processes of an Almighty Worker, they would have been invaluable as a serviceable hypothesis for future efforts. ”

“ When you speak to the average person about labor—industrial work, especially—he seems to [Pg 122] get the idea at once that you are opposed to his head being educated—that you simply wish to put him to work. ”

“ Business, occupation, etc., may be what one does independently; employment may be in the service of another. Work is any application of energy to secure a result, or the result thus secured; thus, we speak of the work of God. Art in the industrial sense is a system of rules and accepted methods for the accomplishment of some practical result ”

“ So far as the external result is held in view, rather than the mental and moral states and growth involved in the process of reaching the result, the work may be called manual, but cannot rightly be termed an occupation. ”

“ Work first, and then rest. Work first and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel. ”

“ Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will, such workers are going along with the essential movement of the world; and this is their strength, and their happy and divine fortune. ”

“ What a falsehood it is to say that genius and industry are incompatible! Does one work of genius exist that has not also been a work of labour? ”

“ It is very conceivable that the labor of man alone laid out upon a work requiring great skill and art to bring it to perfection may be more productive in value than the labor of nature and man combined when directed toward more simple operations and objects; ”