Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

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.

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

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

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

“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.

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.