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

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.

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

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.

It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.

“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.

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.

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

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

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