Sir Joshua Reynolds

1723–1792 · English portrait painter & first President of the Royal Academy

Sir Joshua Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century and the founding President of the Royal Academy of Arts. His annual Discourses to Academy students — delivered 1769–1790 — are landmarks of art theory, and it is a sentence from his Twelfth Discourse, on avoiding “the real labour of thinking,” that later generations compressed into the aphorism now pinned on Edison.

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“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking”

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