Henry David Thoreau Quotes

When I was 14, and for the next four years, I was lifting and hauling 10-gallon milk cans full of milk. That will put muscles on you even if you're not trying.

It felt good doing a physical job, and going home each evening feeling like I had really done a day's work.

I don’t like the work but mother is dead and father brought me down [to the mines.] I had no choice. I have a harness on like a horse and pull carts. Large carts hold seven and a half hundredweight. [750 lbs.]

I was 18 and had taken A-levels in Woking where I grew up. But I didn't want to go to university so left sixth-form college. My father was in the building industry and he found me a job stripping concrete panels off buildings. It was dangerous work on high scaffolds, sometimes 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and often weekends too.

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.

Bodily labor alleviates the pains of the mind and from this arises the happiness of the poor

I never liked to work, I mean manual work.

SIR,-Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as a history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating very little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet.

If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing.

Who remove stones, bruise their fingers.

The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?

With this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world

I worked in a chicken factory, in a steel foundry, I worked on the bins for a year or so. It started as a summer job, but I stayed on because I liked it very much. I liked it that it made you very fit, doing all the lifting and that, so I could wear short-sleeved t-shirts, which I'd never been able to do before!

I pour concrete. I'm a construction guy.

I did a lot of heavy-lifting - construction, demolition, that kind of thing. Dusty, dirty work.

My most memorable job was on a lobster boat. I was a pretty strong kid, and they just needed someone who could haul pots on 200 ft. of line.

I like being outside and I like hard work.

The problem with Hollywood is that nobody works. They have meals. They go to Pilates. But it's not enough. So they do drugs. If everybody had a pile of rocks in their backyard and spent every day moving them from one side of the yard to the other, it would be a much happier place.

Believe me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains.

Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.

I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.

In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy

When you're outside in those elements, there's something out there that takes it out of you, so you work real hard. It was physically demanding, but in a very good way. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing, when things are physically demanding 'cause everyone is rising to the occasion.

The duty of labor is written on a man's body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.

A labourer cannot sit at the table and write, but a man who has worked at the table all his life can certainly take to physical labour.