Great Throughts Treasury

"Without my work in natural science I should never have known human beings as they really are. In no other activity can one come so close to direct perception and clear thought, or realize so fully the errors of the senses, the mistakes of the intellect, the weakness and greatnesses of human character." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"No research is ever quite complete. It is the glory of a good bit of work that it opens the way for something still better, and this repeatedly leads to its own eclipse." - Mervyn Henry Gordon

"Happiness, she loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self sacrifice. She will be found not is palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories; and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child." -

"Happiness is a rebound from hard work. One of the follies of man is to assume that he can enjoy mere emotion. As well try to eat beauty. Happiness must be tricked. She loves to see men work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will not be found in the palaces, but lurking in cornfields and factories, and hovering over littered desks. She crowns the unconscious head of the busy child." -

"All work and no rest takes the spring and bound out of the most vigorous life. Time spent in judicious resting is not time wasted, but time gained." -

"The minister is to be a live man, a real man, a true man, a simple man, great in his love, great in his life, great in his work, great in his simplicity, great in his gentleness." - John Hall

"But it is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work. That is always boring in the long run, and it has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is ever laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is to be educated." - Edith Hamilton

"An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more." - E. Roland Harriman, born Edward Roland Noel Harriman, aka "Bunny"

"When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people, He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and there are still more pages possible." - Robert Henri

"God then, is the source of all things; the Aeon is the power of God; and the work of the Aeon is the Kosmos which never came into being, but is ever coming into being, by the action of the Aeon, and that which olds the universe together is the Aeon." - Hermetica NULL

"Man’s record upon this wild world is the record of work, and of work alone." -

"Patience, persistence, and power to do are only acquired by work." -

"Play is a sacred thing, a divine ordinance, for developing in the child a harmonious and healthy organism, and preparing that organism for the commencement of the work of life." -

"Work is the means of living, but it is not living." -

"Work was made for man, and not man for work. Work is man’s servant, both in its results to the worker and the world. Man is not work’s servant, save as an almost universal perversion has made him such." -

"Let this be understood, then, at starting; that the patient conquest of difficulties which rise in the regular and legitimate channels of business and enterprise is not only essential in securing the success which you seek but it is essential to that preparation of your mind, requisite for the enjoyment of your successes, and for retaining them when gained. So, day by day, and week by week; so month after month, and year after year, work on, and in that progress gain in strength and symmetry, and nerve and knowledge, that when success, patiently and bravely worked for, shall come, it may find you prepared to receive it and keep it." -

"There is a price tag on human liberty. That price is the willingness to assume the responsibilities of being free men. Payment of this price is a personal matter with each of us. It is not something we can get others to pay for us. To let others carry the responsibilities of freedom and the work and worry that accompany them - while we share only in the benefits - may be a very human impulse, but it is likely to be fatal." - Eugene Holman

"Whether a man accepts from fortune her spade and will look downward and dig, or from aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit." - William Dean Howells

"The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

"Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself." - Victor Hugo

"When I go down to the grave I can say I have finished my day's work. But I cannot say I have finished my life. My day's work will begin again the next morning." - Victor Hugo

"Holiness is religious principle put into motion. It is the love of God sent forth into circulation, on the feet, and with the hands of love to men. It is faith gone to work. It is charity coined into actions, and devotion breathing benediction on human suffering, while it goes up in intercession to the Father of all piety." - Frederick Dan Huntington

"Education: To be at home in all lands and ages; to count Nature as a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are the leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in general enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends." - William De Witt Hyde

"Men and women are here for only one purpose, and, for that matter, the most sublime purpose: to try to re-create life in its original form by restoring beauty and order in their individual lives and by continuously striving to achieve the common dream of one world community... We must master and direct our destiny. We are here, therefore, to continue God’s creative work and give to life its true meaning: to arrive at His image and likeness and turn the world into a loving society of men and women." - Archbishop Lakovos, born Demetrios Koukouzis NULL

"Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts... It is a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them." - Osa Johnson, née Leighty

"The medical profession tells us that there are four conditions which must be met if we are to have any chance of leading a happy life: physical security, social recognition, adventure, emotional security. In today's highly technical and scientific life, these four considerations become increasingly important, but we should add one vital ingredient: love. Love of our fellow man, love for our work, and the conviction that this love insures the future for all of us." - Archibald Quincy Jones

"A work of art is not completed on the canvas. It is completed in the mind of the man who looks at it." - Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

"I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God." -

"Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, or forced to do your best, will bred in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know." - Charles Kingsley

"Keep a definite goal of achievement constantly in view. Realize that work well and worthily done makes life truly worth living." -

"There is no point in work unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

"The work that the schoolmaster is doing is inestimable in its consequence. He is laying the foundation of the careers of men who are to lead the next generation. He is also knocking all the best stuff out of a great number of them." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"The march of Providence is so slow and our desires to impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our mean of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope." - Robert Full

"Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator’s hands... before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God." - Henry Parry Liddon

"If ever this free people, if this government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this human wriggle and struggle for office - that is, a way to live without work." - Abraham Lincoln

"My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it." - Abraham Lincoln

"Although generalizations are dangerous, I venture to say that at the bottom of most fears, both mild and severe, will be found an overactive mind and an underactive body. Hence, I have advised many people, in their quest for happiness, to use their heads less and their arms and legs more... in useful work or play. We generate fears while we sit; we overcome them in action. Fear is nature's warning signal to get busy." - Henry C. Link

"Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people." - Walter Lippmann

"To have faith where you cannot see; to be willing to work on in the dark; to be conscious of the fact that so long as you strive for the best, there are bertter things on the way, this in itself is success." -

"You may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma." - James Russell Lowell

"Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession." - Robert S. MacArthur

"Take two workers in an organization. One limits his giving by wages he is paid. He insists on being paid instantly for what he does. That shows he is a man of limited imagination and intelligence. The other is a natural giver. His philosophy of life compels him to make himself useful. He knows that if he takes care of other people's problems they will be forced to take care of him to protect their own interests. The more a man gives of himself to his work, the more he will get out of it, both in wages and satisfaction." - Compton Mackenzie, fully Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie

"Farmers now are members of a capital-intensive industry that values good bookwork more than backwork. so several times a year almost every farmer must seek operating credit from the college fellow in the white shirt and tie - in effect, asking financial permission to work hard on his own land." - Andrew H Malcolm

"It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work." - Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

"If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual." - Henry T. Maschal

"Best trust the happy moments. What they gave makes man less fearful of that certain grave and gives his work compassion and new eyes, the days that make us happy make us wise." - John Masefield

"In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted." - James McCosh