quote · Legacy record
Don't object that your duties are so insignificant; they are to be reckoned of infinite significance, and alone important to you. Were it but the more perfect regulation of your apartments, the sorting away of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging of your papers,—"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might," and all thy worth and constancy. Much more, if your duties are of evidently higher, wider scope; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, a mother, weigh earnestly what claim does lie upon you on behalf of each, and consider it as the one thing needful, to pay them more and more honestly and nobly what you owe. What matter how miserable one is if one can do that? That is the sure and steady disconnection and extinction of whatsoever miseries one has in this world.
Don't object that your duties are so insignificant; they are to be reckoned of infinite significance, and alone important to you. Were it but the more perfect regulation of your apartments, the sorting away of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging of your papers,—"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might," and all thy worth and constancy. Much more, if your duties are of evidently higher, wider scope; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, a mother, weigh earnestly what claim does lie upon you on behalf of each, and consider it as the one thing needful, to pay them more and more honestly and nobly what you owe. What matter how miserable one is if one can do that? That is the sure and steady disconnection and extinction of whatsoever miseries one has in this world.
Approximate author period: c. 1838 AD · industrial
Meaning not yet available
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- Author or tradition
- Thomas Carlyle
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1838 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1795–1881)
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Optimist’s Good Morning (1911) (1911 AD)
Complete signed selection 236; printed byline: Thomas Carlyle; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.