Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence. Maurice Blanchot
About This Quote

In this quote, George Santayana compares reading to a child who is ignorant of the world around him. In fact, the book that you are reading is not going to teach you anything about the world. For example, if you read a novel by a woman named Jane Austen, this does not mean that you can be a great lady like her. She was a great author but it would be a mistake to try to live your life as a character in one of her novels.

Source: Infinite Conversation

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More Quotes By Maurice Blanchot
  1. Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort...
  2. Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does...
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