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

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

God sells us all things at the price of 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.

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

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.

Labor is no disgrace.

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.

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

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.

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

“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.