“A very useful book might be written with the sole object of advising what parts of what books should be read. It should not be a book of elegant extracts, but should merely refer to the passages which are advised to be read. It might also indicate what are the chief works upon any given subject. For example, take rent; the important passages in Adam Smith, Ricardo, Jones, Mill, and other writers, should be referred to.”
Source: Brevia: Short Essays and Aphorisms. (1871), p. 37
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Arthur Helps17
British writer 1813–1875Related quotes
“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”
Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot
Source: The Marriage Plot
“We should read much, we should not read many books.”
Multum legendum esse, non multa.
Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer
Letter 9, 15.
Letters, Book VII
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
“You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.”
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 55
Variant: Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.
William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate
As quoted in Novelists in Interview (1985) edited by John Haffenden
Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist
Source: On Human Communication (1957), On Cognition and Recognition, p. 302