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

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

If 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.