Labor is no disgrace.

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.

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

“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.

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

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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.