God sells us all things at the price of labor.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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.

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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

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