"Do work" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conditions seem pretty bad. Some do work and some don't work. Nobody savin' that I sees. Takes it all to live on. I haben't give the present generation ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... saw that he could do nothing with his wife, he said to the boy: "My dear son, you see I am growing old. I can no longer do work enough to need no assistance. Your mother won't have you here. So go wherever the Lord may lead you to earn your daily bread, and, if it is His will, I'll come to see you now and ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... hope and distrust, or a degree of despair, do work and answer one another as doth the noise of the balance of the watch in the pocket. Life and death is always the motion of the mind then; and this noise continues until faith is stronger grown, and until the soul is better acquainted with the methods and ways of God ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... so clearly defined and so well known, at any rate in all our large centres of labor, that definition is hardly necessary. For England and America alike the sweater is simply a sub-contractor who, at home or in small workshops, undertakes to do work, which he in turn sublets to other contractors, or has done under his own eyes. The business had a simple and natural beginning, the journey-worker of fifty years ago taking home from his employers work to be done there either by himself or some member of his family. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... favourite resort of the diarist. On both occasions of his visits to Southwark Pair he made the inn his base of operations as it were, especially in 1668 when the puppet-show of Whittington seemed "pretty to see," though he could not resist the reflection "how that idle thing do work upon people that see ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... true, or that more than this is true, supposing his heart is unsound, what does it mean to me?" What it excluded was easier to realise than what it meant. Unless Quisante were to have not existence only, but also health, such health at least as enables a man to do work although not, may be, to glory in the doing of it, unless there were to the engine wheels sound enough to answer to the spur of the steam that his brain's furnace made, nothing could come about of what Lady Castlefort's Mightiness prophesied, nothing of what ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... as the shadows in the great canvas crowded with heroic figures of French women of all classes who are working to the limit of their strength for their country or their families. They may be difficult to manage and they may insist upon working at what suits their taste, but they do work and work hard; which after all is the point. Madame Goujon took me through several of the ouvroirs which her society had founded to teach the poor widows—whose pension is far inferior to the often brief allocation—a number of new occupations under ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the Dream. "It is a good thing to make every step that you take, do work that will help some ...
— By the Roadside • Katherine M. Yates
... appropriate place in every-day life. The shepherd on his daily rounds, travelling over miles of moorland, could not well accomplish his task without his Collie's skilful aid. One such dog, knowing what is expected of him, can do work which would otherwise require the combined efforts of ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... remembered that Mr. Hosier was arrested in Norfolk in 1863 by order of the Federal general then commanding that department, and was being carried toward the Indian Pole Bridge to be put to work on the defences of Norfolk. He was not disposed to do work in that way, and when well out from Norfolk he eluded the guard that had him, and directed his steps toward the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth river. On his arrival, seeing boats passing up and down, he secreted himself until ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... worked in the fields with the men except when I was called to the house to do work there. 'Masse' Jenkins was good and kind to all us slaves and we had good times in the evening after work. We got in groups in front of the cabins and sang and danced to the music of banjoes until the overseer would come along and make us go to bed. No, I don't remember what ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... a channel for itself so far below the ocean level? Rivers cannot do work of this kind unless they have a swift current; moreover, as they empty into the ocean, their beds must be above sea level. Some people think that the great glacier, which certainly at some time occupied the depression in which the lake lies, dug out the canon. This glacier was over three ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... easy for the parents to see their boys thus forced to do work which only a short while before had been done by a retinue of servants. And the capstone of humiliation seemed to be when Edward and his brother, after having for several mornings found no kindling wood or coal to build the fire, decided to go out of evenings with a basket and pick ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... wife, "because we know Davy will do work that is worth while and because he is Davy. Second, because it is good for us to give a little out of ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... helps me and I would do work if I could get work I can do. I could do light work. Times is hard. Hard to get a living. I don't mind work. I couldn't do ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... difficulties. "We are always faced with bankruptcy in three months," said Dr. Yannic in conversation. The Government has been very hospitable to the Russians, of whom it has almost 60,000 on its hands. It feeds them and tries to place them where they can do work. It treated with Wrangel for the establishment of 20,000 Cossacks to be planted along the marches of Albania, and would have loved to have them, but has not as yet been able to take them for lack of money. Serbia has done more for Russia than any ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... fact that steam is a force that can do work had to await the invention of machinery by means of which to apply the new force to industrial processes. The use of practical activity will likewise necessitate many changes in the educational machinery before its richest results are ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... by a word simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun s rays can be focused and made to do work, to set fire to wood." The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... people!" cried Christina. "Do you think we do not do work for other people? Mamma gives away loads; she does a great deal for the poor. She is ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... men's rights; yet I cannot see how the 'British Working Man' is to be made to bear the whole burden of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it. I doubt if it be possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are driven, and in which there is no hope and no pleasure, without trying to shirk it—at any rate, shirked it has always been under such circumstances. On the other hand, I know that there are some men so right-minded, that they will, in despite of irksomeness and hopelessness, drive ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... at midnight till twelve the next night. Therefore, with the Jews six o'clock on Friday evening was the beginning of Saturday. They kept Saturday, or the Sabbath, instead of Sunday as a day of worship. On that day, which they kept very strictly, it was not allowable to do work of any kind; so they could not anoint Our Lord's body till the Sabbath ended, which was about six o'clock, or sunset on Saturday evening. So, as the Holy Scripture tells us, they came very early in the morning; for Mary Magdalene and these good women were Jews, and strictly observed the Jewish law. ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... passed the Landis farm on his way to the creek for a days fishing, call to Mary: "Miss Midleton, will you please send the butter over with the servant today, as I shall not return home in time for dinner" Sibylla said, "I ain't no servant. I'm hired girl What does that make out if I do work here? Pop got mad with me 'cause I wouldn't work at home no more for him and Mom without they paid me. They got three more girls to home yet that can do the work. My Pop owns a big farm and sent our 'Chon' to the college, and it's mean 'fer' him not to give us girls money for ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while it will endure; and quit it with regret, when it gives way under them. Rash enthusiast of Change, beware! Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours; how all Knowledge and all ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... before it may be his part to do work in which he will need a comrade who can be trusted—as a rock can ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sitting up for him.' Sometimes, in the morning, she finds him awake, 'but he don't want to get up, and he puts his hands on his sides and says, 'Mother, it hurts me here when I breathe.' I can work, and I do work,' adds she, 'all the time—but I can't make as much as ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... in forty-eight hours for you, eh?" said Mr. Farrell. "Well, boy, you do work fast! Come on now, and give me the cold facts. How did the whole front end of this car come ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... that the agriculture, the pasturage, the fisheries, and every species of honest industry about the country, cannot employ the one moiety of the population, let them work as lazily as they like, and they do work as if a pleugh or a spade burnt their fingers. Aweel, sir, this moiety ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... would build a place like that, only with a different roof. Then he would jump up, because he felt he ought to go somewhere and do work, for he was bored and ashamed of idling; at times he would long for the manor-fields over which he had guided the plough, where the settlement now stood. Then a great fear would seize him that he would be powerless when the Germans, who had felled forests, shattered rocks and driven away the ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... dwell on one's worthlessness, and to speak of one's righteousness as filthy rags. It removes every stimulus to effort. If you really feel like that, you had better take to your bed permanently—you will do less harm there than pretending to do work in the value of which ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beasts in one plough, with one great lummokin fellow to hold the handle, and another to carry the whip, and a boy to lead, whose boots have more iron on them than the horses' hoofs have, all crawling as if going to a funeral! What sort of a way is that to do work? It makes me mad to look at 'em. If there is any airthly clumsy fashion of doin' a thing, that's the way they are always sure to git here. They're a benighted, obstinate, bull-headed people the English, that's the fact, and always was.' Well done, Jonathan—quite true!—From ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... corruptingly presented knowledge, and unnecessary and undesirable knowledge? In practice, under the laws I have sketched, it is quite probable the evil would flourish extremely, and necessary information would be ruthlessly suppressed. Many of our present laws and provisions for public decency do work in that manner. The errand-boy may not look at the Venus de Medici, but he can cram his mind with the lore of how "nobs" run after ballet girls, and why Lady X locked the door. One can only plead here, as everywhere, no law, no succinct ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... doubt the non-toxic soaps and so on that Browne describes do work as advertised, but for keeping pests of dried material at bay, for protecting hides, preserved insects and so on, do not copy the recipes from this book. Though many of Browne's observations are in every way practical and intelligent, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... dis young generation is triflin' as they can be. They don't half work. Some do work hard and no 'pendence to be put in some 'em. 'Course they steal 'fo' dey work. I say some of 'em work. Times done got so fer 'head of me I never 'speck to ketch-up. I never was scared of horses. I sure is dese automobiles. I ain't plannin' no rides on them airplanes. Sure ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... entirely with all condensation in the cylinders, while saturated steam coming in contact with passages in cylinder saddle and walls of cylinders, is immediately cooled and in cooling, a part of it is changed back into water which affects the pressure and therefore its capacity to do work. ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... other, and must acquire it in the same way—that is by attending to one thing at a time and not being in too great a hurry. Proficiency is not to be attained here, any more than elsewhere, by short cuts or by getting other people to do work that no other than oneself can do. Above all things it is necessary here, as in all other branches of study, not to think we know a thing before we do know it—to make sure of our ground and be quite certain that we really do ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four-o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to truants' names. The class is all wrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... wonderful workings of things—as we know all things do work together for good—this fact was good for Ursula. It taught her that, in losing Guy, she had not lost all her blessings. It showed her what in the passion of her mother-love she might have been tempted to forget—many ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... I do know and think that I always have known my own powers. Neither has my aptitude in debate nor my capacity for work justified me in looking to the premiership. But that, forgive me, is now not worthy of consideration. It is because you do work and can work, and because you have fitted yourself for that continued course of lucid explanation which we now call debate, that men on both sides have called upon you as the best man to come forward in this difficulty. Excuse me, my friend, again, if I say that I expect to find your manliness ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... as I first said, I am learning daily some new phase of the business, and am surprised that I never had known it before. I have, too, taken perhaps more space than I ought, regarding tools and bench, yet the older I grow, the more I can see the importance of this part, that I may be enabled to do work well and quick. Besides, I have left such repairs as the chain and fusee, uprighting wheels, repairing cases, adjustment to position, heat and cold, isochronism, enlarging jewels, or changing angles of pallet stones, etc., etc., all of which I do as necessity demands, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... she, "are seven house-servants, large and small, to do work which at the North a man and two capable girls would easily do. I have to devise ways to subdivide work and give each a share. My husband carried it so far that he had one boy to black boots and another shoes, and these two 'bureaus' ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... and exciting now, Merton, but there will be long hours—yes, days and weeks—when you'll have to act like a man, and to do work because it ought to be done and must ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... my child; you ain't to blame. I'll stand by you if no one else will. It don't take me long to know a good honest girl when I see one, and I know you mean well. What's more, I've took a likin' to you, and I can be a pretty fair sort of friend if I do work for ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... conditions, very little demand indeed is made upon the mind, though I am glad to say that the proportion of men engaged in this kind of work is diminishing. But in any community with the solid, healthy qualities which make up a really great nation the bulk of the people should do work which calls for the exercise of both body and mind. Progress can not permanently exist in the abandonment of physical labor, but in the development of physical labor, so that it shall represent more and more the work of the trained mind ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the surface of the comb or glass stayed still until it jumped to the bit of paper or hair; then it stayed still on that. This was the only kind of electricity most people knew anything about until the nineteenth century; and it is not of any great use. Electricity must be flowing through things to do work. That is why people could not invent electric cars and electric lights and telephones before they knew how to make electricity flow steadily rather than just to stand still on one thing until it jumped across to another and stood there. In the next chapter we shall take up the ways ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... communities the home has been relieved of much of the household drudgery by the development of cooperative creameries, cooperative laundries, and other community institutions to do work that was formerly done entirely in the home. In such cooperative enterprises, citizens of the community buy shares of stock as in the case of the fruit growers' association. In one community in Michigan "a vote was taken, the women voting as well as the men, to determine the sentiment ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... English-speaking nations alone in the world have such nurses? Except in small groups, they are unknown in France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, or any other country in the world. In no other land will women leave homes of ease and often of luxury to do work that no servant would touch, for wages that no servant would take—work for which there will be very little reward but the unmeasured gratitude of the very few. They stand to-day as an unanswerable proof that as nations we have risen higher in the level of civilization than any of ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... parts of the human body do work on chemical compounds, and from the general supply manufacture for local wants; thus the liver builds for itself of the material that is prepared in its own division laboratory. The same of heart and brain. No ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... to all the privileges of custodia honesta[1] which means they are allowed to wear their own clothes, work or not, as they choose; if they do work, one half their earnings is given to them. Their only penal obligation is silence during work, meals, school and prayers. A friend of Sr. Serrati, the ex-editor of the Italian journal Il Proletario, tells me that Serrati was a political prisoner during the late war; that he was sentenced ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... of Research, where there should be no teaching, and students who had demonstrated that they had anything promising in them, in science, literature, languages, history, anything, should have the means and the opportunity to make investigations and do work. See what a hard time inventors and men of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... vessel of their blood, Mingled with venom of suggestion— As, force perforce, the age will pour it in— Shall never leak, though it do work as strong ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... at five o'clock this morning," he went on. "She do work hard, my daughter Bess, and she's a good one to me, and so is little Liz here. Thank the ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a work of art, better deserving the title than a flaunting floral quilt which goes by the name of "art needlework"—designed apparently to worry the eye by day and to give bad dreams by night to whoever may have the misfortune to sleep under it. Is anyone nowadays modest enough to do work such as the couching in outline in Illustration 90? Yet what ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... "Yes, when he do work." The embroiderer bent over her frame with renewed diligence, and shut her lips ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... and all his energies were turned to becoming a great commander." His apprenticeship, before reaching command, was probably too short; and, as captain, his generous disposition to trust others to do work for which he knew them fitted, would naturally lead him to throw the manipulation of the vessel upon his subordinates. But although, absorbed by broader and deeper thoughts of the responsibilities and opportunities ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... we have certain examples of advances of corn, or money, at harvest-time for the payment of reapers, which have already been noticed under loans.(722) An advance of money and food to workmen may perhaps be put here. But it is also a contract to do work. It reads thus: ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... opinion as to little Annie's literary ability based upon those same Zenith Club papers. You will remember that I have often told you that you should not waste your time writing club papers when you could do work like that." ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... she concluded to call upon her and offer her congratulations. When informed by Louisa Hawthorne, who came to her in the parlor, instead of the elder sister, that "The Gentle Boy" was written by Nathaniel, Miss Peabody made the significant remark, "If your brother can do work like that, he has no right to be idle" [Footnote: Lathrop, 168. Miss Peabody would seem to have narrated this to him.]—to which Miss Louisa retorted, it is to be hoped with some indignation, that her brother never ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... is that about your work that suggests to me you would be happier earning five hundred a year than you ever will be earning two thousand. To pay your dividend—to earn your two thousand—you have to do work that brings you no pleasure in the doing. Content with five hundred, you could afford to do only that work that does give you pleasure. This is not a perfect world, we must remember. In the perfect world the thinker would ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... employer and employee, automatic compensation specifically recognizes it. The backbone of the present so-called 'capitalism'; namely, the hiring of the unpropertied class by the propertied class to do work for wages, is not caused by automatic compensation to lose a single vertebra, and automatic compensation has nothing whatever to do with Socialism except that it is accomplished under the supervision of the State." If compulsory insurance against accidents "has nothing whatever to ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... as if to consider whether he would accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by answering, 'Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, het or wet, blow or snow, famine or sword, my day's work ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy |
