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

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

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

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

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.

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

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

“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.

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.

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

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.