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.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.