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.

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

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

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.

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

“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.

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

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.

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.

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.