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

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.

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

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.

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

Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

“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.

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

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Labor is no disgrace.

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

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