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

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.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

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.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

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.

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.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

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

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