Labor is an unquestionable condition of happiness: firstly, unconstrained work that you enjoy doing, and secondly, physical labor, which gives you an appetite and a deep, calming sleep.
The life of Arcadian shepherds and our beloved court life are both absurd and unnatural, albeit attractive. For there can never be true pleasure where pleasure is turned into work. It is only the moments of rest from work, rare, brief and unprepared for, that are truly pleasant and useful.
— Kant
Not only does physical labor not preclude the possibility of intellectual work, it makes it more worthy and even encourages it.
Physical labor is everyone’s duty and happiness; the work of the intellect and imagination is work that is exclusive; it becomes duty and happiness only for those who are called to it. A calling can be recognized and proven only by how much peace of mind and material wealth the scientist or the artist sacrifices in order to yield to his calling.
Eternal idleness should have been included in the torments of hell, but, on the contrary, it was placed among the joys of paradise.
— Montesquieu
Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man.
— Carlyle
Labor is a need, whose deprivation is suffering and in no way a virtue. To consider labor a merit is as abnormal as to consider human nutrition a merit and a virtue.
If you want to feel cheerful, labor until you are tired, but not overexerted. A good state of mind is always disturbed by idleness and only rarely by overwork.
