Work and Profession

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never led to good intention’s goal.

Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

That low man seeks a little thing to do,

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation … The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow men.

Distinguish between real needs and artificial wants and control the latter.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

All business depends upon men fulfilling their responsibilities.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

The girls are all giggling, then one girl suddenly remembers the wild goat. Up there, on the hilltop, in the woods and rocky ravines, the peasants saw him butting his head against the trees, looking for the nannies. He’s gone wild, and the reason why is this: if you don’t make an animal work, if you keep him only for stud, he likes to hurt, he kills.

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

I said, “A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones.”

For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees.

The Liner she’s a lady, an’ she never looks nor ’eeds— The Man-o’-War’s ’er ’usband, an’ ’e gives ’er all she needs, But, oh, the little cargo boats that sail the wet seas roun’, They’re just the same as you an’ me a-plyin’ up and down!

Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? My duty all ended, Who have watched his mold of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome, Pining, pining.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank Till the last galoot’s ashore.