Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

“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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.