“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
Source: Les Misérables
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Victor Hugo 308
French poet, novelist, and dramatist 1802–1885Related quotes
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
"The Brooklyn Divines." Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, NY), 1883.
“Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately you occasionally find men disgrace labor.”
Speech at Midland International Arbitration Union, Birmingham, United Kingdom (1877).
1870s
Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter One, Number One And the Political Economy Of Communication, p. 56
“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
Book II, Chapter XV.
Source: The Analects, Other chapters
1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)
Context: The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated — quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
