Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

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

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.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

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

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.