There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Interpretation
Reading can be driven by enjoyment or the desire to impress others.
This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights the dual motives behind reading books. On one hand, it emphasizes the intrinsic pleasure and enjoyment that comes from engaging with a good book; on the other hand, it critiques the tendency of some readers to choose books not for personal enjoyment, but to enhance their social status by showcasing their literary knowledge or interests. This observation opens a discussion about the true purpose of reading and the motivations behind our engagement with literature.
In practice
In a book club discussion to highlight the importance of reading for pleasure.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
A Brahmin is not so much in need of education as a Chandala. If the son of a Brahmin needs one teacher, that of a Chandala needs ten.
Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.
If you spend an extra hour each day of study in your chosen field you will be a national expert in that field in five years or less.
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
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