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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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

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

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

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

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.

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.

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

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.