Thoughts on Life and Religion: An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable Professor Max MüllerMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Thoughts on Life and Religion: An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable Professor Max Müller
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Life; Philosophy; Religion; Theology
_Gifford Lectures, I._
WORK
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._
THE WORLD
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