Intellectual Effort Quotes

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

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

It's good to make your brain work more than your body.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her - the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man's opinion is as good as another's. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is - and doesn't forgive ignorance.

Neither an assembly line nor a stock market nor an oil well did it, simply what came from one small skull and that one right hand.

The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.

One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory

Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

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.