Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

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

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

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

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.

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

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

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.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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

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.