Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Work

"We do not, in fact, step out of the movement of things, ask ‘What am I to do’ and, having obtained an answer, step in again. All our actions, all our questionings and answerings, are part of the movement of things, and if we can work on things, things can work on us - if they can be our ‘vehicles’, we also can be vehicles; social and other forces can work through us." - John Anderson

"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed." - John Anster, fully John Martin Anster

"The happiness of a man is to do the true work of a man." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"Art is right reason in doing of work." -

"Art is simply a right method of doing things. The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces." -

"One of the great problems that must be solved in any attempt to work out a scientific world-view is that of bringing the being who puts forward the world-view within the world-view. By treating man, including his mental processes, as a purely, as a purely physical object, operating according to exactly the same laws as all other physical things, this object is achieved with the greatest possible intellectual economy. The knower differs from the world he knows only in the greater complexity of his physical organization." - David Malet Armstrong, aka D. M. Armstrong

"Solitude has a healing consoler, friend, companion: it is work." - Berthold Auerbach

"Begin -- to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished." -

"Honesty is the precondition for genuine scientific and scholarly work." - Leo Baeck

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks." - Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley

"All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had my periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all." - Honoré de Balzac

"Hope is the better half of courage. Hope has it not sustained the work, and given the fainting heart time and patience to outwit the chances and changes of life." - Honoré de Balzac

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." - J.M. Barrie, fully Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet

"The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven." - Isaac Barrow

"In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years." -

"How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire

"Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death. I can work out a good character much faster than anyone can lie me out of it." - Lyman Beecher

"No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt." - Max Beerbohm, fully Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm

"Fear is an insidious virus. Given a breeding place in our minds, it will permeate the whole body of our work; it will eat away our spirit and block the forward path of our endeavors. Fear is the greatest enemy of progress... Fear is met and destroyed with courage." - James Ford Bell

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -

"The only way an artist can ever personally be a failure is to quit work." - Thomas Hart Benton

"Hebrew has but one word - Avoda - for work and worship." - Hugo Bergmann

"All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"Honest work bears a lovely face for it is the father of pleasure and the mother of good fortune. It is the keystone of prosperity and the sire of fame. And best of all, work is relief from sorrow and the handmaiden of happiness." - Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin

"Your brilliant ideas come in a flash, but the flash comes only after a lot of hard work. Nobody gets a big idea when he is not relaxed and nobody gets a big idea when he is relaxed all of the time." -

"The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people who have become wealthy have become so thanks to work they found profoundly absorbing. The long term study of people who eventually became wealthy clearly reveals that their "luck" arose from accidental dedication they had to an arena they enjoyed." - Srully Blotnick

"Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"If it were possible for children to develop without any interference from the outside world, no special stimulation for their creative work would be necessary. Every child would use his deeply rooted creative impulses without inhibition, confident." - W. Lambert Brittain, fully William Lambert Brittain

"Pray for and work for fullness of life above everything; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart." - Phillips Brooks

"To say, "well done" to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge." - Phillips Brooks

"We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living." - Charles R. Brown

"The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work." -

""Men of action," whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it. They are essential men, we cannot do without them, and yet we must not allow all our vision to be bound by the limitations of "men of action."" - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"To bring one's self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy." - Thomas A. Buckner

"Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others." -

"By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely." - Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler

"Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body, and the over work of the brain. In this railway age the wear and tear of labor and intellect go on without pause or self-pity. We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more, from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles; we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"If people knew how hard I have to work to gain mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all." -

"There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play tht is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness." - Frank Gelett Burgess

"There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornados, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control." -

"A man's work whether in music, painting or literature is always a portrait of himself." - Samuel Butler

"An honest God's the noblest work of man." - Samuel Butler

"To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious." - Samuel Butler

"I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The effect of attention to quality, upon every man in the service, from the president of the concern down to the humblest laborer, cannot be overestimated." - Andrew Carnegie

"All that man does outwardly is but the expression and completion of his inward thought. To work effectually, he must think clearly; to act nobly, he must think nobly. Intellectual force is a principal element of the soul's life, and should be proposed by every man as the principal end of his being." - William Ellery Channing

"It is the mind which does the work of the world, so that the more there is of mind, the more work will be accomplished." - William Ellery Channing

"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves." - William Ellery Channing

"All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work. Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.