Lapham’s Quarterly

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.

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.

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

“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.

Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.

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 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.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

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

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

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

Labor is no disgrace.

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.

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

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

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.