"I don't believe," said Lord Stanley (now Earl of Derby) at
Glasgow, "that an unemployed man, however amiable and otherwise
respectable, ever was, or ever can be, really happy. As work is
our life, show me what you can do, and I will show you what you
are. I have spoken of love of one's work as the best preventive
of merely low and vicious tastes. I will go further, and say that
it is the best preservative against petty anxieties, and the
annoyances that arise out of indulged self-love. Men have thought
before now that they could take refuge from trouble and vexation
by sheltering themselves as it were in a world of their own. The
experiment has, often been tried, and always with one result. You
cannot escape from anxiety and labour--it is the destiny of
humanity.... Those who shirk from facing trouble, find that
trouble comes to them. The indolent may contrive that he shall
have less than his share of the world's work to do, but Nature
proportioning the instinct to the work, contrives that the little
shall be much and hard to him. The man who has only himself to
please finds, sooner or later, and probably sooner than later,
that he has got a very hard master; and the excessive weakness
which shrinks from responsibility has its own punishment too, for
where great interests are excluded little matters become great,
and the same wear and tear of mind that might have been at least
usefully and healthfully expended on the real business of life is
often wasted in petty and imaginary vexations, such as breed and
multiply in the unoccupied brain.
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