Meaning of “My trade and art is to live.”

As a Man Thinketh; Allen uses circumstance as a mirror for character and habitual thought.

The Conduct of Life; the line connects knowledge of life with accumulated experience and the lessons that experience makes intelligible.

Joseph Andrews, Book I, Chapter I, Project Gutenberg #9611. Fielding opens his narrator’s discussion of exemplary lives by observing that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts, then develops the claim through imitation and the moral purpose he assigns to writing. It is eighteenth-century literary argument, not a modern experimental finding about learning.

Every Man His Own University, Chapter I, “Every Man’s University,” Project Gutenberg #36955, copyright 1917 witness. Conwell opens the chapter with “A distinct university walks about under each man’s hat” and develops the metaphor through observation, reading and independent thought. It is historical motivational/educational rhetoric, not evidence that formal education is unnecessary.

What Is Man?, opening machine-and-metal analogy; the Old Man uses iron and gold to argue for limits within his deterministic model of human development.

The Song of the Lark, Part VI, Chapter X, Project Gutenberg #44. ‘Artistic growth is... a refining of the sense of truthfulness’ is narrator reflection immediately after Harsanyi calls passion the artist's ‘open secret’ and as Thea Kronborg comes into fuller command of her mature performance. It belongs to Cather's fictional account of artistic formation and performance, not an empirical measurement of artistic development or a guarantee that all artists mature in the same way.