“Honest work is much better than a mansion.”

CNN Larry King Weekend (2002)
Context: Ireland has a very different attitude to success than a lot of places, certainly than over here in the United States. In the United States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day, I'm going to get that bastard. It's a different mind-set.

Even at the age of 102 he said this as quoted in [Our Leaders, http://books.google.com/books?id=YwTh-vjSFXUC&pg=PA51, 1989, Children's Book Trust, 978-81-7011-701-8, 63]

The Choice http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1602/, st. 1
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)

As quoted in "One nation or many?" https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20170522044424/http://www.economist.com/node/8173164 (16 November 2006), The Economist

The New York Times Columns, The Populism Perplex (November 25, 2016)

Más vale el buen ocio que el negocio.
Maxim 247
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 103

This is derived from Alexander Pope's "An honest man's the noblest work of God." Motto of the essay "The Gods" (1876) as published in The Gods and Other Lectures (1879).