If you have found a work to which you are ready to sacrifice the whole of your life, and if you have faith in yourselves, others will have faith in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must be done will be done.

Gifford Lectures, II.

What flimsy things the so-called pleasures of life are—how little in them that lasts. To delight in doing one's work is life—that is what helps us on, though the road is sometimes very stiff and tiring—uphill rather it would seem than downhill, and yet downhill it is.

MS.

A distaste for work is only another name for a distaste for duty, a disregard for those commandments which hold society together, a disregard of the commandments of God. No doubt there is that reward in work that after a time it ceases to be distasteful, and like many a bitter medicine becomes liked, but that reward is vouchsafed to honest work only.

MS.

Work is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or disappointment try hard work; it will not fail you.

Autobiography.

No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise, or posthumous blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future?

Autobiography.

Put your whole heart, or your whole love into your work. Half-hearted work is really worse than no work.

Last Essays.

Much of the best work in the world is done by those whose names remain unknown, who work because life's greatest bliss is work, and who require no reward beyond the consciousness that they have enlarged the knowledge of mankind and contributed their share to the final triumph of honesty and truth.

Chips.

True immortality (of fame) is the immortality of the work done by man, which nothing can make undone, which lives, works on, grows on for ever. It is good to ourselves to remember and honour the names of our ancestors and benefactors, but to them, depend upon it, the highest reward was not the hope of fame, but their faith in themselves, their faith in their work, their faith that nothing really good can ever perish, and that Right and Reason must in the end prevail.

Chips.

It is given to few scholars only to be allowed to devote the whole of their time and labour to the one subject in which they feel the deepest interest. We have all to fight the battle of life before we can hope to secure a quiet cell in which to work in the cause of learning and truth.

Chips.

What author has ever said the last word he wanted to say, and who has not had to close his eyes before he could write Finis to his work?

Autobiography.

THE WORLD

There is no other Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus what He was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz. children of God.

Silesian Horseherd.

I cannot help seeing order, law, reason or Logos in the world, and I cannot account for it by merely ex post events, call them what you like—survival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else.

Last Essays.

Think only what it was to believe in an order of the world, though it be no more at first than a belief that the sun will never overstep his bounds. It was all the difference between a chaos and a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and an intelligible and therefore an intelligent providence. How many souls, even now when everything else has failed them, when they have parted with the most cherished convictions of their childhood, when their faith in man has been poisoned, and when the apparent triumph of all that is selfish, ignoble, and hideous has made them throw up the cause of truth, of righteousness, and innocence as no longer worth fighting for, at least in this world; how many, I say, have found their last peace and comfort in the contemplation of the order of the world, whether manifested in the unvarying movement of the stars, or revealed in the unvarying number of the petals and stamens and pistils of the smallest forget-me-not. How many have felt that to belong to this cosmos, to this beautiful order of nature, is something at least to rest on, something to trust, something to believe, when everything else has failed. To us, this perception of law and order in the world may seem very little, but to the ancient dwellers on earth, who had little else to support them, it was everything because, if once perceived, if once understood, it could never be taken from them.

Hibbert Lectures.

We must learn to see a meaning in everything. No doubt we cannot always see cause and effect, and it is well we cannot. It is quite true that we do not always get our deserts. And yet we must believe that we do—only if we knew it, the whole fabric of the world would be destroyed, there would be neither virtue nor vice in the whole world, nothing but calculation. We should avoid the rails laid down by the world because we should know that the engine would be sure to come and mangle us. In this way the world holds together, and it could not in any other way.

Life.

There is to me a beauty and mystery and sanctity about flowers, and when I see them come and go, no one knows whence and whither, I ask what more miracles do we want,—what better, more beautiful, more orderly world could we wish to belong to than that by which we are surrounded and supported on all sides? Where is there a flaw or a fault? Then why should we fear unless the flaws are within us, and we will not see the blessing and the rest which we might enjoy if we only trusted to the Author of all that beauty, order, and wisdom about us. It is a perfect sin not to be happy in this world, and how much of the misery which there is, is the work of men, or could be removed by men, if they would but work together for each others' good.