W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I really enjoy working physically.

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.

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

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.

Working manually is not considered bad in the U.S.

It's really helpful to be physically engaged in something that's completely different from my day-to-day work.

It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.

I never mind scrubbing floors, vacuuming or bending and carrying stuff. Each time I do it I think, this is instead of going to the gym.

I love being hands-on.

I like working with my hands, need to do that more often.

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'd rather do manual labor than sit behind a desk. And as my grandparents got older, I'd fly out there and help out around the farm. We'd tear barns down; we'd build barns. I'd rather be outside rolling hay or driving the tractors.

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

I never liked to work, I mean manual work.

But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.

Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

An hour's hard digging is a good way of getting one's mind back in the right perspective.

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.

The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.

The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.