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

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

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

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

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

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

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

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