"Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up"
About this Quote
Progress does not arrive by accident; it is coaxed, dug out, and made. The phrase turns the casual idiom turn up into a verb of labor, as if the world were a field that yields only when someone takes a plow to it. There is a gentle rebuke to complacency here. Waiting for circumstances to improve is not a strategy. Outcomes appear when intention meets effort.
The sentiment fits James A. Garfield, a self-made scholar and soldier who rose from an Ohio farm to the presidency. He worked on the Erie Canal as a young man, taught classics, led troops for the Union in the Civil War, and spent years in Congress pressing for education and civil service reform. His life was a sequence of undertakings that required initiative rather than inheritance, and he was steeped in the 19th-century American belief that character and effort could transform conditions. The Gilded Age was full of inventions, booming industries, and also political patronage. Garfield favored professionalizing government because he believed public good required deliberate, persistent work, not favors and luck.
The language is plain and democratic: somebody, not a hero or genius. That somebody might be a scientist who experiments until a result appears, a citizen who organizes neighbors to change a law, or a student who keeps turning pages until understanding breaks through. The aphorism does not deny luck; it reframes luck as what shows up after groundwork is laid. Even collective achievements begin with particular hands starting the task.
There is also a moral edge. If good things are missing, perhaps no one has yet done the turning. The line pushes responsibility back on us, not as blame but as possibility. Treat obstacles like soil, not stone. Bend to the work, and the world becomes less a place of random appearances and more a landscape responsive to human purpose.
The sentiment fits James A. Garfield, a self-made scholar and soldier who rose from an Ohio farm to the presidency. He worked on the Erie Canal as a young man, taught classics, led troops for the Union in the Civil War, and spent years in Congress pressing for education and civil service reform. His life was a sequence of undertakings that required initiative rather than inheritance, and he was steeped in the 19th-century American belief that character and effort could transform conditions. The Gilded Age was full of inventions, booming industries, and also political patronage. Garfield favored professionalizing government because he believed public good required deliberate, persistent work, not favors and luck.
The language is plain and democratic: somebody, not a hero or genius. That somebody might be a scientist who experiments until a result appears, a citizen who organizes neighbors to change a law, or a student who keeps turning pages until understanding breaks through. The aphorism does not deny luck; it reframes luck as what shows up after groundwork is laid. Even collective achievements begin with particular hands starting the task.
There is also a moral edge. If good things are missing, perhaps no one has yet done the turning. The line pushes responsibility back on us, not as blame but as possibility. Treat obstacles like soil, not stone. Bend to the work, and the world becomes less a place of random appearances and more a landscape responsive to human purpose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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