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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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