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Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were goodnatured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.
It is a common thing for men to benumb their own arms, and make them as dead and useless by leaning too much upon them: so it is in a moral as well as a natural way: all the prudence and pains in the world avail nothing without God. So saith the Psalmist, in Psalm cxxvii. 2. “It is in vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrow, for so he giveth his beloved sleep.”
A man would think, he that rises betimes fares hard, works hard, sits up late, cannot but be a thriving man; and probably he would be so, if God's blessing did second his diligence and frugality. But the Psalmist intends it of diligence in a separate sense; a diligent hand working alone, and then it is all in vain, and serves only to confirm the common proverb—Early up and never the nearer. Labour without God cannot prosper; and labour against God will not only destroy itself, but the laborer too.
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninetynine percent perspiration.
If you can't be bothered to work on Saturday, don't bother to come in on Sunday.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a lifepurpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a freeflowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an everdeepening river there, it runs and flows;—draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grassblade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clearflowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his godgiven Force, the sacred celestial Lifeessence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, “selfknowledge” and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logicvortices, till we try it and fix it.“
There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alonemany of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.
We always compare our labor with its results. We do not devote more effort to a given task if we can accomplish it with less; nor, when confronted with two toilsome tasks, do we choose the greater. We are more inclined to diminish the ratio of effort to result, and if, in so doing, we gain a little leisure, nothing will stop us from using it, for the sake of additional benefits, in enterprises more in keeping with our tastes.
Man's universal practice, indeed, is conclusive in this regard. Always and everywhere, we find that he looks upon toil as the disagreeable aspect, and on satisfaction as the compensatory aspect, of his condition. Always and everywhere, we find that, as far as he is able, he places the burden of his toil upon animals, the wind, steam, or other forces of Nature, or, alas! upon his fellow men, if he can gain mastery over them. In this last case, let me repeat, for it is too often forgotten, the labor has not been lessened; it has merely been shifted to other shoulders.
The Devil finds work for idle hands.
First Appeared in 1721