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

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

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

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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

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.

“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.

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.