Mental Labor Quotes

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Most of my work is in my mind.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

If I'm flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I'm always thinking about maths, even when I'm doing other things. A lot of the time you're going up blind alleys and it's very frustrating, but then you have a sudden rush of ideas. You can live off that for quite some time.

He who labors with his mind rules over he who labors with his hand

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.

Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.

It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading, you don't have to work.

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

The arm which should have launched the thunderbolt was occupied in guiding the pen.