William Morris Quotes About Purpose

Hopes and Fears for Art, lecture “The Art of the People”; Project Gutenberg #3773. The claim belongs to Morris’s Arts and Crafts social argument.

Hopes and Fears for Art, lecture “The Beauty of Life”; Project Gutenberg #3773. This is Morris’s aesthetic-social position, not an empirical necessity claim.

News from Nowhere, narrator William Guest observing Morsom’s community; Project Gutenberg #3261. This is narrative description inside a utopian novel.

News from Nowhere, Chapter XV, ‘On the Lack of Incentive to Labour in a Communist Society,’ Project Gutenberg #3261. Old Hammond says the society gained happiness through the absence of artificial coercion, ‘the freedom for every man to do what he can do best,’ and slowly learned knowledge of what labour was wanted. It is fictional utopian dialogue and historical-social argument, not Morris autobiography or settled economic science.

Signs of Change, lecture “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”; Project Gutenberg #3053. “Thus” refers to creative work engaging mind, memory, imagination and bodily effort.

Signs of Change, lecture “Dawn of a New Epoch”; Project Gutenberg #3053. The sentence occurs inside Morris’s proposed organization of socially useful labor.

Signs of Change, lecture “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” beginning on printed page 141, Project Gutenberg #3053. Morris defines the hope that makes work worth doing as hope of rest, useful product and pleasure in the work itself, then summarizes those three elements in the retained sentence. It remains socialist moral and economic argument about labor, not a universal workplace-satisfaction metric.