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

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

“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.

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

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

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

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

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