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

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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.