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.

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

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.

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.