cognitive labor Quotes

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 basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

We think work with the brain is more worthy than work with the hands. Nobody who thinks with his hands could ever fall for this.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God's Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers.

If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

But if it’s true that the only true life I had was the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that, at the end of the day, they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!

Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

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

Machines taking over jobs - it's the history of civilization. Replacing farm animals, old forms of manual labor, now taking over small, menial aspects of cognition. But there's still plenty of room for creativity, for curiosity - many things that are related to passion, like art. But also, things about human communication and challenges, massive challenges that we left behind because we didn't want to take so much risk, such as space exploration, deep ocean exploration.

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