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.

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

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

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

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.

“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.

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

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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

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.

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.

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

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