We should live and labor in our time that what came to us as a seed may go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom, may go to them as fruit. This is what we mean by progress.
There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Intelligence increases mere physical ability one half. The use of the head abridges the labor of the hands.
The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.
A library is but the soul's burial ground; it is the land of shadows. Yet one is impressed with the thought, the labor, and the struggle, represented in this vast catacomb of books. Who could dream, by the placid waters that issue from the level mouths of brooks into the lake, all the plunges, the whirls, the divisions, and foaming rushes that had brought them down to the tranquil exit? And who can guess through what channels of disturbance, and experiences of sorrow, the heart passed that has emptied into this Dead Sea of books?
Any man can work when every stroke of his hands brings down the fruit rattling from the tree ... but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement... that requires a heroism which is transcendent.
There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those, who will.
They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.
Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; and before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty.
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
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