The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don’t half know to this day?
Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.
Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy.
Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.
All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
Properly speaking, all true work is religion.