I can't abide to see men throw away their tools i' that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i' their work, and was afraid o' doing a stroke too much.... I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it.
The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP, Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
Like bees that are drowned in the honey which they make, the workmen are crushed by the wealth they create.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
- When the toiler bends and labors till his sweat turns into pearls,
- 'Tis a nobler decoration than the coronets of earls.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Caelestis"
Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
GEORGE ELIOT, Silas Marner
The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
Many hands make light work.
There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work.... The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.
What is earned with hard labor is eaten with pleasure.
See that bunch of loafers on the street corner. They seldom work, and how they live no one can tell. Are they happy? Nay, nay; the good boxes on which they sit testify to their restlessness, for they have tried to while away their long hours by whittling them, when there was nothing else on hand to help pass the time. Certainly the idle, yawning, gaping, stretching loafer is not an ideal of a happy life.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY, Helps to Happiness
No man ever did or can do a great work alone.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
We can imagine a world in which there is no work. A world bathed in incessant summer, whose seed-times and harvests are ever mingling, whose springing influences perpetually ascend, whose fruitage perpetually ripens through all the procession of its golden year. A world in which man would never feel the sting of want, And where the felicities of being would unfold without his effort. But we cannot conceive any such world, connected with human peculiarities and necessities, one half, one tithe so glorious as our old world of struggle and of labor. For wherever God has admitted man's agency the noblest results, the achievements of real worth and splendor are the fruits of patient and sinewy toil.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life--a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The workman is a vine that is crushed by the burden of its own clustered grapes.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
Slow work produces fine goods.
Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.
KOBO ABE, The Woman in the Dunes
Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.
ELLEN GILCHRIST, The Writing Life
The Devil often finds work for them who find none for themselves.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.
MAXIM GORKY, Untimely Thoughts
How strange it is that so many people have the belief that work is a burden and that idleness means happiness. Many are longing for the day that they will possess sufficient to quit work and take the world easy. They imagine that when that time comes their happiness will be complete. Alas, how many have reached this period of life to find themselves greatly disappointed! Idleness fails to give the happiness they expected and time drags more heavily than ever. The hardest job we ever tried was that of doing nothing.
