Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
John RuskinRead
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
Interpretation
Labor is essential for overcoming boredom, immoral behavior, and financial struggles.
In this quote, John Ruskin suggests that engaging in meaningful work not only alleviates the monotony of life but also serves as a moral anchor, steering individuals away from vice, and providing a pathway out of poverty. By laboring, people can find purpose, build character, and improve their economic circumstances, highlighting the transformative power of work.
In practice
During a motivational speech on the importance of hard work, this quote could inspire students.
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.
You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm - we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish - ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.
To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.
See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?
I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
Work has never really been work for me. It's been a natural extension of my life.
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
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