Temperance and labor are the two true physicians of man. – Jean Jacques Rousseau

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields. – Charles Wagner

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work. – Geoffrey Norman

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body.  No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. – Thomas Jefferson

A man’s best friends are his ten fingers. – Robert Collyer

Sweat cleanses from the inside.  It comes from places a shower will never reach. – George Sheehan

When everything is finished, the mornings are sad. – Antonio Porchia

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade.  It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor. – D.H. Lawrence

God sells us all things at the price of labor. – Leonardo da Vinci

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

Sweat silently.  Let’s have no squawking about a little expenditure of energy. – Martin H. Fischer

Maybe a person’s time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food. – Frank A. Clark

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. – Robert Green Ingersoll

Without labor nothing prospers. – Sophocles

Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil. – Henry van Dyke

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria – anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor. – W.P. Kinsella

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure. – Gerald Brenan,

Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased. – Adam Smith

People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results. – Albert Einstein

Nothing got without pains but an ill name and long nails. – Scottish Proverb

Precious gems are profoundly buried in the earth and can only be extracted at the expense of great labor. – Sri Anandamayi Ma

The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea. – Isak Dinesen

It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keep us from rusting, and so becoming useless. – Charles Simmons

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living. – John D. Rockefeller

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor. – Oscar Wilde

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. – Thomas A. Edison

Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice. – Henry Ford

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work. – Thomas Carlyle

Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly. – Martin H. Fischer

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price. – Samuel Johnson

A mind always employed is always happy.  This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity. – Thomas Jefferson

I have no more than twenty acres of ground,” he replied, “the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils – boredom, vice, and want. – Voltaire

When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. – Pablo Picasso

If you want to kill time, try working it to death. – Sam Levonson

Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life. – Marc Chagall

What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions. – Arnold Glasow

Employment is nature’s physician, and is essential to human happiness. – Galen

Labor is man’s greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working. – Orville Dewey

To labor is to pray. – Motto of the Benedictines

It is better to wear out than to rust out. – Richard Cumberland

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair.  Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. – Charles Baudelaire

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful. – Alice Walker

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception. – George Bernard Shaw