Study = hard work

From a used-book find:

The story is told of an Egyptian prince who went to the library at Alexandria to learn geometry from Ptolemy, the great mathematician. The prince explained to Ptolemy that he had only a little time between hunting and military activities to devote to study so he wanted to learn geometry very quickly and very easily. Ptolemy sent him away with the statement: “There are many royal roads, but there is no royal road to learning.” The statement is still true. The road to learning is study, and it is a hard, steep, rough road. It takes longer to learn fifty Latin words than it takes to dig a ditch one foot deep, one foot wide, and fifty feet long. There was a college professor in Pittsburgh who spent his summers working as a section laborer on a railroad in northern Michigan, because it was a restful business to lift railroad ties after a year’s hard study. Yes, study is hard work.

William H. Armstrong, Study Is Hard Work (David R. Godine, 1995).

[Royal road: “a way of attaining or reaching something without trouble” (New Oxford American Dictionary).]