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.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

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.

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.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.

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

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

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

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

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