God sells us all things at the price of labor.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

Labor is no disgrace.