It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Most people work the greater part of their time for a mere living; and the little freedom which remains to them so troubles them that they use every means of getting rid of it.
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
No task, rightly done is truly private. It is part of the world's work.
One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
One of the saddest things is, the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day, nor make love for 8 hours.
The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.
Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman.
The monarchy is a labour-intensive industry.
They say hard work never hurt anybody, but I figure why take the chance.
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering a position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Most people like hard work, particularly when they're paying for it.
We work to become, not to acquire.
If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities, then every business office, government agency, golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.
Hasten slowly, and without losing heart, put your work twenty times upon the anvil.
How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.
