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.