4 quotations linked to Signs of Change by or associated with William Morris, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Work, leisure, happiness, art, human capacities, useful production, social change and Morris’s socialist critique of industrial labor.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.”
After describing work that engages mind, memory, imagination and the will to create, Morris presents such activity as a way of making daily life active and meaningful.
Signs of Change, lecture “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”; Project Gutenberg #3053. “Thus” refers to creative work engaging mind, memory, imagination and bodily effort.
“the main pleasure of life is the exercise of energy in the development of our special capacities.”
The line makes development itself a source of satisfaction: people flourish, in Morris’s account, when their abilities are actively exercised instead of left unused.
Signs of Change, lecture “Dawn of a New Epoch”; Project Gutenberg #3053. The sentence occurs inside Morris’s proposed organization of socially useful labor.
“the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, in elevating them by art”
Morris locates happiness in engaged attention to ordinary life and in making daily activity more meaningful through art, rather than treating aesthetic life as separate from routine experience.
Signs of Change, lecture “The Aims of Art”; Project Gutenberg #3053. The passage belongs to Morris’s socialist argument about labor, leisure and art in daily life.
“worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.”
Morris evaluates work by whether it leaves room for rest, produces something worth using and gives the worker some creative satisfaction during the process itself.
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.
