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

Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.

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.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

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

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

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.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.