Today people just go on working, working and working. Not because they are creating something fantastic, but simply because they have to work, otherwise they don’t know what to do with themselves.

Work for work's sake. There are some who are really the salt of the earth in every country and who work for work's sake, who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven.

[T]here has never been a society in all of human history where the average person did not have to work. Sure, some crapulent prince could lay around all day and do nothing, but everyone else had to till the soil or pound the anvil or carry a spear.

Some people work just to make the money to support the other things in their life that provide meaning, be it a family or a cause or a hobby that may seem silly to you or me but is central to their individual pursuit of happiness. Some people don’t work for money at all. Priests, stay-at-home parents, and volunteers in a thousand different institutions aren’t pursuing wealth; they are pursuing meaning through love and love through meaning.

Work is something serious. It’s what you do for a purpose, because you believe that you have to go on living. You have to work to survive, because you think you have to survive. But you don’t have to. And this whole thing doesn’t have to go on, which is why it does. I know that seems paradoxical, but think about it — life is full of examples of this. If I try to impress someone, I usually don’t. If you try too hard with anything, you usually make a mess of it.

Work is a special part of those indispensable conditions that a truly human society must guarantee so that everyone can not only survive and live, but even more so, fulfil themselves according to God's plan.

The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

For ALL of human history, work has been around survival, a unit of labor in a scarcity machine. 

However, once we achieve universal basic services (where everyone is granted food, housing, healthcare, and more), human existence will rise to a level that kings couldn't afford 100 years ago.

All the things that make life worth living take work.

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family … and so ad infinitum.

Some people work to live, and other people live to work. Then some people, like me, are both unemployed and alive (at least at the time of this writing).

God's a completely different idea from most people's vision... Everybody... is God... Creative, rich in ideas, full of love. All of that is there in every single individual... at their very best, but most people are not at their best. Most people are at work... working all day... to get just enough food for their families... to pay the rent... the schooling... and everyone's involved in working for money to live. Are we born for that? Is that what life is about? I suggest that it isn't. It's become that because we have come to wrong conclusions and we have disobeyed the laws of life...

Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life – that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid or permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eyewink called fame. He founds a family, and spends his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.