“Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.”
Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 47
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Georges Duhamel 23
French writer 1884–1966Related quotes

“We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.”
As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, vii. 23.
Variant translation: The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less.

[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 50, 978-1-93659700-0]
Spiritual path, Knowledge
"On Delany the Magician", a foreword to Trouble on Triton (1996) by Samuel R. Delany, and reprinted in Acker's collection Bodies of Work (1996)
Source: Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
Context: Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”
Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays
A Marriage Made In Heaven; or, Too Tired For an Affair (1993)

No. 206
Apophthegms (1624)

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter

“I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.”

“I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could”