Meaning of “work while it is called Today.”

Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim connects disciplined use of working time with the ability to gain leisure.

The Way to Wealth; a Poor Richard maxim on delay and useful employment of time.

Past and Present, Book III, Chapter XII, “Reward,” printed page 250 in Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works, Library Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Chapman and Hall), Project Gutenberg #26159. “Work, and therein have well-being” opens Carlyle’s enduring “Gospel” of work inside explicitly Christian Victorian social criticism. This collection preserves that historical moral-religious setting and does not present the sentence as a modern health, wellness or employment guarantee.

The Master-Word in Medicine, 1903. Osler immediately acknowledges that acquiring the work-habit can be a hard battle; the context therefore supports persistence without turning the passage into a modern workaholism prescription.

Men of Invention and Industry, Chapter IX, “Charles Bianconi: A Lesson of Self-Help in Ireland”; Project Gutenberg #725. This excerpt is Smiles’s narrative conclusion immediately after an anecdote about saving time.

The Master-Word in Medicine, address delivered October 1, 1903 at the opening of the new buildings of the University of Toronto Medical Faculty; reviewed against the represented 1903 John Murphy pamphlet, Internet Archive identifier b28060805. ‘The master-word is Work’ is Osler’s organizing refrain and is followed by his appeal to write the word on the heart and forehead. This remains historical professional rhetoric rather than an endorsement of unsafe working hours or workaholism.