You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

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

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 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.

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

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

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

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

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

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.