Physical Toil Quotes

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.

The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.

To this day, I hate walnuts and I hate onions because on weekends when the walnuts and onions were in season, we were out there first thing in the morning and out there until the sun went down topping onions or picking walnuts.

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.

That was where my dream began to take hold, of not havin' to pick cotton and potatoes, and not havin' to be uncomfortable, too hot or too cold. That in itself had driven me to try to find some better way of life.

I feel closest to God with a pitchfork full of crap in my hands. I'm serious!

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.

I'm the kind of person who, if I were living in another time, if I had to pick any time, I would probably be a pioneer. I just love the simplicity of what it means to work hard with your hands - to eat and survive.

I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.

I had rather tug at the oar than to occupy such a place.

Happier are the hands compast with yron, then a heart with thoughts.

My grandmom worked as a maid for most of her life, and she worked in the tobacco and the cotton fields, whatever she could get.

The vinery is not made with blessings, but with hoes and spades.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Even though I hated doing farming and wanted to just get out of the village, I would work from 5 in the morning till 5 in the evening.

I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.

Well, I've cleaned bathrooms in a warehouse. That was pretty terrible. But I can't complain because I'm sure other people have done worse.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so as to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in - your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

Ooh, ah, ooh, ah, that's the sound of the men working on the chain gang.