What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
Interpretation
Loving books allows us to connect with past thinkers and escape reality.
This quote reflects the profound joy and privilege that comes from a deep love of literature. It suggests that books serve as a bridge to converse with great minds of the past and to explore fantastical worlds, enriching our lives in ways that are both enlightening and escapist.
In practice
In a book club meeting to express why you enjoy reading.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
In Kenya, I met wonderful girls; girls who wanted to help their communities. I was with them in their school, listening to their dreams. They still have hope. They want to be doctor and teachers and engineers.
Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind.
As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.
We must always meet our obligation to those who fall behind without our assistance. But let's remember, without a race there can be no champion, no records broken, no excellence - in education or any other walk of life.
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
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