“The man's the work. Something does not come out of nothing.”

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

Part I. Généralités (Generalities), Chapter I. Prolégomènes (Prolegomena).
Treatise on Elegant Life (1830)
Original: (fr) Or les trois classes d'être créés par les mœurs sont :
L'homme qui travaille ;
L'homme qui pense ;
L'homme qui ne fait rien.

Source: Zazie in the Metro

Source: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

Source: East of Eden

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Five, God, p. 173

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: What I would prefer to have is to have a kind of magic where we say, "OK, we’re going to do a magical performance on this night, at this time. You come along, if you don’t think it’s magical, that’s fine. We’ll show you. We’ll show you what we mean, and you judge for yourself." That’s only fair. So a lot of the magic we do tends to gravitate toward the practical end, toward something that is tangible. Where you’ve got a record at the end of it, a performance at the end of it, a painting at the end of it. You’ve conjured some energy, some idea, some information from somewhere and put it in a tangible form. You conjure something into existence in a literal sense. A rabbit out of a hat. Something out of nothing. That’s one level to it, but there’s a lot of background to that. That’s the stuff that people see, that’s the end result of the process. But we also do a lot of ritual work purely on our own.

Book I, lines 361-362
See also "One of our poets (which is it?) speaks of an everlasting now", Robert Southey, The Doctor, chap. xxv. p. 1
Davideis (1656)