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

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.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

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.

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

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.