All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.
There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter.
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
If an author does not give reasons for his propositions, they can only be treated as expressions of personal opinion on his part.
To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
It is only when you try to refine the obvious, and give the distinctions greater precision, that you get into difficulties.
Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship.
Having a method without materials to which it can be applied is as useless as having the materials with no method to apply to them.
Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not.
A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story.
Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.
One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing. Since.
Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit.
If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.
The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.
From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
It is only obvious that teaching is a very special art, sharing withonly two other arts-argriculture and medicin-an exceptionally important characteristic.
Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.
To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man.
The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.
Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.
One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.
Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.
Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education.
It is not the stretching that tires you, but the frustration of stretching unsuccessfully because you lack the skill to stretch effectively.
In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.
Books are absent teachers.
Any good argument can be put into a nutshell.
True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.
Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.
Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.
We love even when our love is not requited.
One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While.
The undemanding reader asks no questions-and gets no answers.
When we ask for love, we don't ask others to be fair to us-but rather to care for us, to be considerate of us. There is a world of difference here between demanding justice... and begging or pleading for love.
We are selfish when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good for ourselves. We are altruistic when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good of others.
The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.
Concentration is another name for what we have called activity in reading. The good reader reads actively, with concentration.
Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.
Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.
Ultimately, we wish the joy of perfect union with the person we love.
It is traditional in America to criticize the schools; for more than a century, parents, self-styled experts, and educators themselves have attacked and indicted the educational system.
The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.
We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.
Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.
