"Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment. As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men and women at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice.

  There is something fine in hard physical labor. One actually stops thinking. 

I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labor itself - down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it -- and repeat.

And yet sometimes - mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired - I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me - a sense of its beauty and its meanings - giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is near complete content." David Grayson.