Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
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David Mitchell
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open,...
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Italo Calvino
We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
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B.F. Skinner
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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Gustave Flaubert
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
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Logan Pearsall Smith
More Quotes By Russell Kirk
If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
Because “we human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue” – imaginative depictions of the truly good life – “we will seek out the imagery of vice.
By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in...
