"Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time"
About this Quote
De Gourmont needles a modern vanity: we like to praise thought as if it were weightless, a decorative accessory to daily life. He insists it is labor, and labor with a particular cost. “Thinking is hard work” isn’t a motivational poster; it’s a complaint dressed as a maxim, the kind of line you write after watching people confuse having opinions with doing the exhausting, solitary grind of actually examining them.
The second sentence tightens the screw. “Burdens” reads as more than simple chores. It’s debt, obligations, social performance, the thousand little pressures that keep a person compliant. De Gourmont’s subtext is that ideas require a kind of inner vacancy: time, energy, and an unpanicked mind. When your day is packed with survival and duty, thinking becomes a luxury you can’t afford. That’s not a romantic defense of the poor as “too busy to think”; it’s an indictment of a culture that piles on constraints and then pretends everyone has equal access to reflection.
Context matters: a fin-de-siecle French novelist and critic steeped in skepticism, writing in an era jittery with industrial acceleration, mass politics, and the professionalization of “public opinion.” The line flatters no one. It suggests that many moral certainties are just overloaded minds reaching for shortcuts, and that freedom isn’t only legal or economic but cognitive. If you want a society capable of ideas, lighten the load - or stop pretending the load doesn’t shape what people can imagine.
The second sentence tightens the screw. “Burdens” reads as more than simple chores. It’s debt, obligations, social performance, the thousand little pressures that keep a person compliant. De Gourmont’s subtext is that ideas require a kind of inner vacancy: time, energy, and an unpanicked mind. When your day is packed with survival and duty, thinking becomes a luxury you can’t afford. That’s not a romantic defense of the poor as “too busy to think”; it’s an indictment of a culture that piles on constraints and then pretends everyone has equal access to reflection.
Context matters: a fin-de-siecle French novelist and critic steeped in skepticism, writing in an era jittery with industrial acceleration, mass politics, and the professionalization of “public opinion.” The line flatters no one. It suggests that many moral certainties are just overloaded minds reaching for shortcuts, and that freedom isn’t only legal or economic but cognitive. If you want a society capable of ideas, lighten the load - or stop pretending the load doesn’t shape what people can imagine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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