Work and Profession

It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

Men may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.

He that is overcautious will accomplish little.

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

 

There are various forms of production: artillery, automobiles, lorries. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Such things are highly necessary. Engineering things. For people’s souls. ‘Products’ are highly necessary too. ‘Products’ are very important for people’s souls. You are engineers of human souls.

 

They carried him 2 not to bury him: They carried him down to crown him…. The poet flourished here, disheveled, Who would not bow before votive lamps But to the common spade.

 

Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.

 

Fresh from brawling courts And dusty purlieus of the law.

 

Ah, why Should life all labor be?

 

Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest: To give and not to count the cost; To fight and not to heed the wounds; To toil and not to seek for rest; To labor and not ask for any reward Save that of knowing that we do Thy will.

 

[ Final diary entry :] Occupation is essential. Andnow with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

To Herbert Westbrook, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

He [Tom Sawyer] had discovered a great law ofhuman action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great andwise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do andthat Play consists of whatever a body is notobliged to do.

I have often noticed that you shun exertion.There comes the difference between us. I courtexertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have apiece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over thecoming enjoyment.

It is not the prize that can make us happy; it is not even the winning of the prize. . . . [It is] the struggle, the long hot hour of the honest fight. . . . There is no human bliss equal to twelvehours of work with only six hours in which todo it.

[ Of wood stumps :] They warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again whenthey were on the fire.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. . . . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

The TV business . . . is normally perceived assome kind of cruel and shallow money trenchthrough the heart of the journalism industry, along plastic hallway where thieves and pimpsrun free and good men die like dogs, for nogood reason.

In the twenty-first century the robot will takethe place which slave labor occupied in ancientcivilization.