er value, at stake. Your honor, your whole career, your future
success, will be affected by the way you do your work, by the
conscience or lack of it which you put into your job. Character,
manhood and womanhood are at stake, compared with which salary is
nothing.

Everything you do is a part of your career. If any work that goes out
of your hands is skimped, shirked, bungled, or botched, your character
will suffer. If your work is badly done; if it goes to pieces; if
there is shoddy or sham in it; if there is dishonesty in it, there is
shoddy, sham, dishonesty in your character. We are all of a piece. We
cannot have an honest character, a complete, untarnished career, when
we are constantly slipping rotten hours, defective material and
slipshod service into our work.

The man who has dealt in shams and inferiority, who has botched his
work all his life, must be conscious that he has not been a real man;
he can not help feeling that his career has been a botched one.

To spend a life buying and selling lies, dealing in cheap, shoddy
shams, or botching one's work, is demoralizing to every element of
nobility.

Beecher said he was never again quite the same man after reading
Ruskin. You are never again quite the same man after doing a poor job,
after botching your work. You cannot be just to yourself and unjust to
the man you are working for in the quality of your work, for, if you
slight your work, you not only strike a fatal blow at your efficiency,
but also smirch your character. If you would be a full man, a complete
man, a just man, you must be honest to the core in the quality of your
work.

No one can be really happy who does not believe in his own honesty. We
are so constituted that every departure from the right, from principle,
causes loss of self-respect, and makes us unhappy.

Every time we obey the inward law of doing right we hear an inward
approval, the amen of the soul, and every time we disobey it, a protest
or condemnation.

There is everything in holding a high ideal of your work, for whatever
model the mind holds, the life copies. Whatever your vocation, let
quality be your life-slogan.

A famous artist said he would never allow himself to look at an
inferior drawing or painting, to do anything that was low or
demoralizing, lest familiarity with it should taint his own ideal and
thus be communicated to his brush.

Many excuse poor, slipshod work on the plea of lack of time. But