His Work
Kaufman is the author of several books, including:
- The Stolen Throne (c. 1907; co-authored with May Isabel Fisk and illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy and Herman Rountree)
- The Winning Fight (c. 1910) being perhaps his most popular work
- Do Something! Be Something! (c. 1912)
- The Efficient Age (c. 1913)
- The Song of Guns (1914, reissued in 1915 as "The Hell-Gate of Soissons And Other Poems")
- The Clock that Had No Hands (c. 1912; a compilation of essays on the value of advertising)
- Neighbors (c. 1914)
Kaufman is known for his essays on success, war poetry, and "Kaufmanisms." A "Kaufmanism" is the persuasive rhetorical juxtaposition of words that reverses the subject and object of a phrase often meant to change its context and meaning, typically used to add additional emphasis to both nouns.
Select Kaufmanisms:
- A coward can't conquer anything, because he can't conquer himself.
- The man who won't go through to the finish has finished at the start.
- They who fight in the dark do not shine in the light.
- Mind your own business and in time you'll have a business of your own to mind.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Kaufman
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.”
—Jacques Maritain (1882–1973)