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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

“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.

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

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

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.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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

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

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.

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

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