Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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.

The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the earth as rough to all my length

That's what you do all the hard work for, to play in situations that put your body through gruelling times. If you're not up to it, pull out.

The physical stamina [in Revolution]. I was just shocked by it. I didn't think I had it in me ever, and I wasn't terribly young when I did it. I was in my early forties. That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.

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.

Because I don't look like I'm skating around as hard as Bobby Bassen doesn't mean my mind isn't working twice as hard as Bobby's mind. Just because I can't fight like Kelly Chase doesn't mean standing in front of the net getting cross-checked and slashed isn't toughness as well.

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.

Stamina. There is a greater physical element to this job than you would think, just being able to grind it out. And I think your ability to not just mentally and emotionally, but physically be able to say, "We got this. We're going to be OK."

For 40 years, I put my body through a tremendous amount of work.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

Cooks build muscles; we can stand all day long on our feet and not feel the pain.

I was trying to perform as best as possible. I was a boy at the time, but worked well with the sickle.

I can work hard and be disciplined like a soldier, but I could never reach their level of fitness.

I used to work in kitchens, doing 12 or more hours a day of physical labor, so today, eight to 12 hours of cooking, chatting or filming feels like a vacation. When I have a scheduled 'day off,' I spend several hours writing, then I clean until I crash from fatigue. I don't relax well.

There's something so empowering about knowing I can pick up an axe and split a piece of wood.

I'm from the country. All I've even done was use my hands. I guess that's how I've strengthened them over the years.

Building stuff. Lifting blocks. That's how I got stronger. I never lifted weights. I just did masonry work with my pops.

I'm known for my strength and it helped that from a young age I was carrying around crates of beer or carpets and heavy rolls of underlay.

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.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

Work my hands in the soil, what's the pay for all the toil? Dust for blood, dust for blood, dust for blood.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

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