The Value of Work

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 22, 1883

The Value of Work.

"What is your secret of success?" asked a lady of Turner, the distinguished painter. He replied, "I have no secret, madam, but hard work." Says Dr. Arnold, "The difference between one boy and another is not so much in talent as in energy." "Nothing," says Reynolds, "is denied well-directed labor, and nothing is to be attained without it." "Excellence in any department," says Johnson, "can now be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." "There is but one method," says Sydney Smith, "and that is hard labor, and a man who will not pay that price for distinction, had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of the fox." "Step by step," reads the French proverb, "one goes very far." "Nothing," says Mirabeau, "is impossible to the man who can will. 'Is that necessary?' 'That shall be.' This is the only law of success." "Have you ever entered a cottage, ever traveled in a coach, ever talked with a peasant in the field, or loitered with a mechanic at the loom," says Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, "and not found that each of those men had a talent you had not, knew something that you knew not?" The most useless creature that ever yawned at a club, or counted the vermin on his rags under the suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect. What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labor. I am no believer in genius, but I believe that labor, judiciously and continually applied, becomes genius.