11 quotes
All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble ... A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.
Past and Present (1843)
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
address at Edinburgh (1866)
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Sir Walter Scott (1838)
He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845)
Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.
That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it.
Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)