Labor is a necessary condition of corporeal life. If Robinson did not work, he would have frozen and died of hunger. Everyone can see this. But not everyone can see the fact that labor is a necessary condition of spiritual life, even though this is as certain as the necessity of labor for the body.
No separation from labor can be without some loss of power, even for the prophets. I doubt not, the faults and vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and sickly habits of the literary class. Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.
— Emerson
Manual labor is the study of the external world.
The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.
When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. But not only health, but education is in the work.
I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without my aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.
— Emerson
If any would not work, neither should he eat.
— 2 Thessalonians 3:10
The one who does nothing does ill.
The one who does nothing always has many helpers.
The mind of an idler is the favorite dwelling place of the devil.
Nature never stops moving and punishes all inactivity.
— Goethe
It is not the most impure work of any kind that you should be ashamed of, but only the most impure of the impure moral states: bodily idleness, which is inextricably linked to the use of other people’s labor.
