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.
—Billie Holiday, 1956Quotes
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835If 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.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954“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.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCI am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
—Clarence Darrow, 1932Man 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.
—Henry George, 1879Toil 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.
—Herman Melville, 1849Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876