Leo Rosten Quotes

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

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

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

But if I didn't read, I'd think, and thinking, when you come down to it, is the most painful thing of all, and the most monopolizing

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

People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

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

Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.

It hurts to imagine stuff. It can give you a headache. Probably doesn't hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more that you can do it, the more you're able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don't think everyone develops it.

Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.

Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: "Let's have done with it now," and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous.

Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.

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

Thinking is the highest form of leverage.

We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

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.

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

Information work is thinking work.

Research now seems to indicate that one hour of inner action is worth seven hours of out-in-the-worl d action. Think about that. You're working too hard.

I don’t want to start thinking again. Not like I have this last week. I can’t think again. Not ever again.

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.