Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

“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.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.