An ancient Greek thought to save his bees a laborious flight to Hymettus. He cut their wings and gathered flowers for them to work upon at home. But they made no honey; it was the law of their natures to cull from the east and from the west and to bring their sweets from afar.
"We are not sent into this world," says Ruskin, “to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts. We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily; neither is to be done by halves or shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all.”
What is it to live? Phillips Brooks answers thus: “The man who knows what it is to act, to work, cries out, ‘This, this alone is to live!’”
Nor is it alone because he must work that one who has tasted to the full the cup of labor cries, in exultation, “This alone is to live.” “Consider how, even the meanest sorts of service, the soul of man is composed into harmony the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, lie beleaguering the soul of every man; but, when he bends himself against his task, all these are stilled, and they shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man becomes a man. The blessed glow of labor in him, is it not as purifying fire!”
"There is one plain rule of life," said John Stuart Mill, "eternally binding and independent of all variations in creeds, embracing equally the greatest moralists and the smallest. It is this: try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it."
The source of life is closed to him who works not. To be at home in the world, to be at one with all the created world and its Creator, man must do with his might what his hand finds to do; for work is human destiny.
If it be our human destiny even its disagreeable features will be found to have great compensations.
"Our reward is in the race we run, not in the prize." The wreath of laurel which crowned the victor in the athletic games of old took on its value not in and of itself, but as a symbol of the contest. So does the glory of the reward of our work, however desirable in and of itself, pale beside the glory of the struggle to obtain it. The privilege of running the race with patience is as great as the privilege of wearing the wreath. "See only that thou work," said Emerson, "and thou canst not escape the reward."
"The everyday cares and duties which men call drudgery," said Longfellow, “are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon its wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.”
It is said of Lord Brougham that he was ill at ease if, in the evening, he could not look back upon a faithfully discharged day's work. Duty well performed, he conceived, is the finest conservator, not only of the health of the mind, but also of the health of the body.
A man's business does more to make him than everything else. It hardens his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition, makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part.
Ralph Waldo Emerson