“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.

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.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

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

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

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.

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

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

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

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

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