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I'd rather be useful than rich. It's more essential to feel you're doing something that's worth doing, rather than making a lot of money.

Making money is marvelous, and I love doing it, and I do it reasonably well, but it doesn't have the gripping vitality that you have when you deal with the happiness of human life and with human deprivation.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.

I know people like to work for me, and quite a few have gotten rich working for me.

The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participation in society and a sense of purpose.

Work is about more than making a living, as vital as that is. It's fundamental to human dignity, to our sense of self-worth as useful, independent, free people.

Even those among us who are lucky enough to love our jobs would have to admit that at least part of the reason we work is to earn money. In between all this work, we like to eat out at restaurants, go on trips, buy nice things, not to mention pay rent and meet the cost of living.

So then you have to say to yourself: Do I want to be rich, or do I want to do good work?

In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.