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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

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.

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

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.