What does this quote mean?

“All true Work is sacred”

Carlyle gives honest work religious significance, arguing that the moral quality of labor matters beyond its immediate economic result.

Source note: Past and Present, Book III, “Reward”; Project Gutenberg #13534. The wording is explicitly theological Victorian rhetoric and is not reframed as a secular empirical claim about every form of employment.

“their work is first, their fee second”

Ruskin contrasts service to the work itself with making payment the sole governing motive, arguing that competent professions retain a purpose beyond the fee.

Source note: The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture on Work; Project Gutenberg #26716. The passage belongs to Ruskin’s Victorian moral and religious argument about labor and professional motives, not to a modern compensation model.

“The foundation of success in life is good health.”

Achievement is treated as dependent on the physical capacity to work, think, and sustain effort rather than as a purely financial or professional matter.

Source note: The Art of Money Getting; Barnum places health before the business maxims that follow.

“work is only done well when it is done with a will”

Ruskin links quality with willing engagement: merely being compelled to perform a task is not, in his argument, enough to produce work done with judgment and commitment.

Source note: The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture on Work; Project Gutenberg #26716. The sentence occurs in a discussion of how hard work should be organized and chosen; its period labor assumptions remain contextualized.

“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”

Good work can carry its own reward when satisfaction comes from meeting the standard rather than from applause or payment alone.

Source note: Lecture “New England Reformers.”

“You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.”

Work is presented as participation in life rather than only a transaction for wages or status.

Source note: The Prophet, “On Work.”