Work and Profession

Work as if you were to live a hundred years, Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeather’d two-legg’d thing, a son.

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease.

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.

As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.

A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine.

Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see And what I do in any thing, To do it as for thee.

Be useful where thou livest.

To business that we love we rise betime, And go to ’t with delight.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

This sweaty haste Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day.

Whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week.

Thou art not for the fashion of these times, Where none will sweat but for promotion.

’Tis not the balm, the scepter and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running ’fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread.

Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks, The air, a charter’d libertine, is still.

Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs, You would say it hath been all in all his study.

The very life-blood of our enterprise.

But in the way of bargain, mark you me, I’ll cavil on the ninth part of a hair.

’Tis like the forc’d gait of a shuffling nag.

Ther nys no werkman, whatsoevere he be, That may bothe werke wel and hastily; This wol be doon at leyser parfitly.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.