Quote collection
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"If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth."
"Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable."
"The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time."
"A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever."
"The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind."
"The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. 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. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do."
"Philosophy is everybody's business."
"Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality."
"If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn."
"I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith"
"We wish the joy of love, the joy of companionship, of being in the company of, in the presence of the person we love, of living a common life with that person, perhaps ultimately the joy of perfect union."
"It's not how many books you get through, it's how many books get through you."
"Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth."
"We love even when our love is not requited."
"All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them."
"In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually."
"The materialist assumption that spiritual substances do not exist is as much an act of faith as the religious belief in the reality of angels."
"Sin is not only manifested in certain acts that are forbidden by divine command. Sin also appears in attitudes and dispositions and feelings. Lust and hate are sins as well as adultery and murder. And, in the traditional Christian view, despair and chronic boredom - unaccompanied by any vicious act - are serious sins. They are expressions of man's separation from God, as the ultimate good, meaning, and end of human existence."
"... The person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another ... No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught."
"Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth."