Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

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.

Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

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.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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.