“[To work is to pray. ] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.”
Laborare est orare.
Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)
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R. H. Tawney 34
English philosopher 1880–1962Related quotes

Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ch01.htm (1904)
Context: The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), pp. 73-74

“Art implies discipline; the more excellent the art, the more rigorous the discipline.”
Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Palace of Love (1967), Chapter 7 (p. 356)

Book I : "Concerning Discipline" Chapter 4 "Determination of the Place of Varta and of Dandaniti"
Arthashastra
[Haggard, Ted, The Life Giving Church, Regal Books, Expanded edition (May 2001), p. 112, ISBN 0830726594]

“Strategy is a system of expedients; it is more than a mere scholarly discipline.”
"On Strategy" (1871), as translated in Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings (1993) by Daniel J. Hughes and Harry Bell, p. 124
Variants:
War is a matter of expedients.
As quoted in "Nothing Went According To Plan" by Jim Lacey in TIME magazine (15 April 2003)
If in war, from the beginning of the operations, everything is uncertain except such will and energy as the commander carries in himself, there cannot possibly be practical value for strategy in general principles, rules derived from them and systems built up upon the rules. … Strategy is a system of expedients. It is more than science, it is the translation of science into practical life, the development of an original leading thought in accordance with the ever-changing circumstances.
As quoted in Government and the War (1918) by Spenser Wilkinson
As quoted in Prussia : The Perversion of an Idea (1994) by Giles MacDonogh, p. 166 The wordplay with wägen and wagen, weigh and venture ("ehe wäg's dann wag's") is much older than Moltke -->
Context: Strategy is a system of expedients; it is more than a mere scholarly discipline. It is the translation of knowledge to practical life, the improvement of the original leading thought in accordance with continually changing situations.

Quote from Van Doesburg's text 'Towards elementary plastic expression', as cited in Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, G-1, July 1923; as quoted in 'Theo van Doesburg', Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 141
1920 – 1926