I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

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

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

I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

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.

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.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.