Quotes about reading (4771 quotes, page 17)

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

“When you learn to read you will be born again… and you will never be quite so alone again.”

Rumer Godden (1907–1998) English writer

Learning

“Good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Women , Angels

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Books , Idea , Bee

“I have read somewhere that we often spend a lifetime searching for what we already have.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: Slightly Married

Search

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Letter to Fanny Guillermet (Zurich, 5 September 1918)

“We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

“When life sucks, read. They can't yell at you for that. And if they do, then you can ignore them.”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Life

“The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

Star

“You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption - of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don't be misled. They are news because they are the exceptions.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Lie

“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Feeling

“Real luxury is time and opportunity to read for pleasure.”

Jane E. Brody (1941) American writer

Pleasure , Time

“to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." from Pavilion of Women page 292”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Women , Soul , Light , Universe

“How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?”

Jasper Fforde book The Big Over Easy

Source: The Big Over Easy

People , Wolf , Housing

“I love you now as I write this, and I love you now as you read this”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Variant: I love you now for what we've already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that's to come.
Source: The Notebook

Love

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life , People , Age , Art

“As the art historian Emily Braun has documented, Klimt read Darwin and became fascinated with the structure of the cell… Thus, the small iconographic images on Adelle's dress are not simply decorative… they are symbols of male and female cells: rectangular sperm and ovoid eggs. …designed to match the sitter's seductive face and her full-blown reproductive capacities.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Art

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 139-140

People , Support , Time

“It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Education

“It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. … In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. … There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

Men , God , Religion , Feeling

“A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it’s going to betray you”

Larry Niven book World of Ptavvs

Source: World of Ptavvs (1966), p. 6

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls & remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

Anthony Bourdain book A Cook's Tour

A Cook's Tour (2001)

Death , Dogs , Understanding

“Philip Tetlock has just produced a study which suggests we should view expertise in political forecasting--by academics or intelligence analysts, independent pundits, journalists or institutional specialists--with the same skepticism that the well-informed now apply to stockmarket forecasting… It is the scientific spirit with which he tackled his project that is the most notable thing about his book, but the findings of his inquiry are important and, for both reasons, everyone seriously concerned with forecasting, political risk, strategic analysis and public policy debate would do well to read the book.”

Philip E. Tetlock (1954) American political science writer

Paul Monk, Australian Financial Review, cited in: Philip E. Tetlock. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, 2015. Back cover.
About

Books , Intelligence , Study

“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

“My main inspiration is sardonic British TV critics like Charlie Brooker, whose excellent show Screenwipe is fully on Youtube, and I recommend everyone watch it. He used to write for a PC magazine I read fanatically as a child. My own style is a mixture of him, possibly Douglas Adams, and internet writers like Seanbaby, Old Man Murray, or Something Awful. I’m such a rip-off.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://www.geek.com/interview-zero-punctuations-yahtzee/
Other Articles

“The Governing Senate... has deemed it necessary to make known… that the landlords' serfs and peasants... owe their landlords proper submission and absolute obedience in all matters, according to the laws that have been enacted from time immemorial by the autocratic forefathers of Her Imperial Majesty and which have not been repealed, and which provide that all persons who dare to incite serfs and peasants to disobey their landlords shall be arrested and taken to the nearest government office, there to be punished forthwith as disturbers of the public tranquillity, according to the laws and without leniency. And should it so happen that even after the publication of the present decree of Her Imperial Majesty any serfs and peasants should cease to give the proper obedience to their landlords... and should make bold to submit unlawful petitions complaining of their landlords, and especially to petition Her Imperial Majesty personally, then both those who make the complaints and those who write up the petitions shall be punished by the knout and forthwith deported to Nerchinsk to penal servitude for life and shall be counted as part of the quota of recruits which their landlords must furnish to the army. And in order that people everywhere may know of the present decree, it shall be read in all the churches on Sundays and holy days for one month after it is received and therafter once every year during the great church festivals, lest anyone pretend ignorance.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Decree on Serfs (1767) as quoted in A Source Book for Russian History Vol. 2 (1972) by George Vernadsky

Life , People , Law , Time

“We don't get weapons contracts, nigga / We don't get cheap labor for our company, nigga / We ARE cheap labour, nigga / Turn off the news and read, nigga / read…”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The 4th Branch
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

“That is how it seems…. But we can’t read the darkness, Mr. Scoresby. It is more than possible that I might be wrong.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995), Ch. 18 : Fog and Ice

“(Bartender Harry) How can you tell the male bird from the female bird? (Sylvia) He's the one with the furrowed brow; she's the happy-go-lucky one…. He's the one reading the sports page; she's the one with 12 pairs of tiny shoes. (Harry) I don't have time for this.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 9

Shoe , Bird , Sport , Time

“People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time - Vol. II [Bernhard Tauchnitz] ( p. 57 https://books.google.com/books?id=sKYzAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA57)
Also in Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide by Andrew Collins & Catherine Peters [Oxford University Press, 1998] (p. 139)

People

“I was a bookish kid. I spent long hours in the library reading everything I could find, histories, biographies, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries. I was curious about the world and there’s no better way to find things out than through the pages of a book. Even today if some kid asks me what’s the first step to take to become a doctor, I answer, “Read, read, read.””

Sanjay Gupta (1969) journalist, medical correspondent, neurosurgeon

Finding My Path in Life (2011)

Books , World , Way , History

“I have been fortunate enough to lead.... an uneventful life. Only on very rare occasions have I ever left Bologna, my native city, and the surrounding province of Emilia. Only twice, for instance, have I been abroad... Besides, I speak only my native language, as you see, and read only Italian periodicals... When I was in my early twenties, my highest ambition was to go abroad study art in Paris.... the material difficulties involved were too great, and I was obliged to remain in Italy. Later I had too many responsibilities, with my teaching and my family [his sisters he lived with] and never managed to go abroad.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Source: 1945 - 1964, Interview, 1960, p. 106

Life , Family , Art , Sister

“Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful, delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

'Poetry' September 1995

Beauty , Way , Sense

“There is something very good in pride of race if you can be satisfied in your heart it is absolutely genuine and is based on things you have see, heard and felt rather than on those you have read.”

Margery Allingham (1904–1966) English writer of detective fiction

The Oaken Heart

Heart

“When I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tenency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — it not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… That God is one, and that all the works and the feelings He has called into existence are ONE; this is a truth (a biblical and scriptural truth too) not in my opinion developed to the apprehension of most people in its really deep and unfanthomable meaning. There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write you on this subject.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 https://archive.org/stream/englischestudien19leipuoft#page/158/mode/1up (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 158.

God , War , People , Truth

“Now, the truth of the matter is that the idea of the meaning of the word 'federal' underwent a change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the states gave up their sovereignty in the Calhounian sense. And if you have any doubt about that, let me just read a sentence from George Washington. 'It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

So all the rights of independent sovereignty, or some of those rights, have been surrendered.
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

Truth , Idea , Sense , Change

“When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.”

Simone Weil Letter to a Priest

Letter to a Priest (1951)

Religion

“We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 325

Study , Forgetting

“The great British Library — an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Art of Book-Making".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Age , Literature , Drawing

“Carl Schmitt in theory is one thing; confined to a few conservatives on the right and a somewhat greater number of envious postmodernists on the left, Schmitt’s ideas have not reached the informed reading public. Schmitt’s books are destined to be confined to the political theory sem inar room for some time to come.”

Alan Wolfe (1942) American political scientist

The Future of Liberalism (2009), Ch. 5 : Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington

Books , Idea , Time

“Consider how one silently reads the following sentence: ‘The forest ranger did not permit us to enter the reserve without a permit’. Note that on its ﬁrst occurrence, the word ‘permit’ was (silently) pro-nounced with the stress on the second syllable (permit), hereas on its second occurrence the stress was on the ﬁrst syllable (permit)… The syntactic and semantic analysis required to determine the appropriate meaning of the word ‘permit’ must have taken place prior to the allocation of the stress pattern; and this in turn, must have taken place prior to the phonemic image entering awareness.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Source: Is human information processing conscious?, 1991, p. 657; Cited in: Giorgio Marchetti, "A presentation of attentional semantics." Cognitive processing 7.3 (2006): 163-194.

“I'd hear, "Because they paid the man, there's no money for the woman." How many times do you think I heard this? Over and over. Then I became a sex symbol. Now, how the hell did that happen? I don't exactly know the moment when it happened, but all of a sudden I'm a bombshell. The way I discovered this was I did Desperado. I had a very hard time with the love scene. I cried throughout the love scene. That's why you never see long pieces of the love scene — it's little pieces cut together. I'm crying most of the time so they have to take little pieces. It took eight hours instead of an hour. I nearly got fired. … Because I didn't want to be naked in front of a camera. The whole time, I'm thinking of my father and my brother… And then when the movie comes out, I read the first review. What do they say about me. "Salma Hayek is a bombshell." I had heard that when a movie does badly here, they say it bombs. So I'm crying. Thinking they're saying, "That terrible actress! It's a bomb! Salma Hayek is the worst part of the movie!" I called my friend and said, "The critics are destroying me!" She says, "No, they're saying you're very sexy." And then I look at all the reviews, and everybody said I was very sexy. So I'm very confused. I said, "I wonder if that's good or bad." I hear, "Yes, that's good." Then I do Fools Rush In, and I'm a pregnant woman. And they say I'm sexy again! I go, "But I'm pregnant!"”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

I'm not even naked in this movie, and they still say I'm sexy. And then it became very depressing — I thought, I guess I'm reduced to that now. That's all I am in the perception of these people.
O interview (2003)

Love , Money , People , Fools

“I had written a beautiful piece for today. It was a rant about how much I despise Halloween. It was witty, well-written and a shining example of a writer at the top of his form. Then I tried to save it, and my computer crashed. So I guess you won't get to read it. Out of all the people in the world, I am the only one who had the opportunity to read my brilliant Halloween article, and now the text is already fading from my cruel, cruel short-term memory, the paragraphs lost in a whirling sea of data, never to be seen again.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

31 October 2002
Fully Ramblomatic

People , World , Beauty , Memory

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Men , People , Knowledge

“This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“Reclaiming the Intellectual Life for Posterity,” Liberal Education, vol. 95, no. 2 http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-sp09/le-sp09_MyView.cfm

Life , Marriage , Literature , Question

“The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet”

Nat Turner (1800–1831) American slave rebellion leader

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

Learning , Perfection

““I’ll drive. You navigate.” He grinned. “I judge people by how well they read maps.””

Jane Yolen book Briar Rose

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 12 (p. 65)

People

“Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"The Waiting" translated by James E. Irby (1959)

People , Art , Idea , Reality

“The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

Hope , Mathematics , Problem , Study

“The word of God is solid; it will stand a thousand readings; and the man who has gone over it the most frequently and the most carefully is the surest of finding new wonders there.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 36.

God

“When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

The New York Times interview (1994)

War , Childhood

“The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Sleigh, Tom. "Robert Pinsky", ‘’BOMB Magazine’’ Summer, 1998. .
Other

Love , Sense

“We're so familiar with written language that we sometimes forget how outlandish a concept it must have seemed to our ancestors. Writing allowed people to copy and transfer their thoughts and their tribal codes of conduct to others, even unto generations they themselves would not live to personally instruct, affect or control. The words themselves must have seemed alive and immortal and as "holy" as ghosts. Written law was thus a way of mastering time and influencing the future, a weapon greater than fire and steel, I hope you'll agree. When read, the written word made the head buzz and ring and fill up with voices and commands from nowhere, as if God Himself had come thundering down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilising and impregnating the mind with his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2005
http://suicidegirls.com/words/Grant+Morrison/
On writing

God , People , Law , Hope

“As translators, we must be courageous, free and passionate about what we are doing. We must constantly strive to enrich our own cultural and linguistic repertoire. We must read, we must write. We must be prepared to rethink, to revise, to rewrite, constantly. We must have endless time and patience. Deadlines are there to be ignored, to be kept alive. Above all we must play with words, ideas and feelings. Delight in them. We must never lose sight of the playfulness and creative licence that are the lifeblood of art and literature, and hence of translation.”

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

Public Lecture (2018)

Art , Feeling , Literature , Idea

“Books give us the ability to see things from different perspectives. They educate us, entertain us, force us to think upon certain issues. And reading a book or reading, in general, is an excuse for those who are less sociable like me for not socialising much. And guess what, it works most of the times.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

Book Lovers Day (2018)

Books , Education , Thinking , Time

“When I asked Bhutto what he thought of Assad, he described the Syrian leader as “The Levanter.” Knowing that, like himself, I was a keen reader of thrillers, the Pakistani Prime Minister knew that I would get the message. However, it was only months later when, having read Eric Ambler’s 1972 novel The Levanter that I understood Bhutto’s one-word pen portrayal of Hafez Al-Assad. In The Levanter the hero, or anti-hero if you prefer, is a British businessman who, having lived in Syria for years, has almost “gone native” and become a man of uncertain identity. He is a bit of this and a bit of that, and a bit of everything else, in a region that is a mosaic of minorities. He doesn’t believe in anything and is loyal to no one. He could be your friend in the morning but betray you in the evening. He has only two goals in life: to survive and to make money… Today, Bashar Al-Assad is playing the role of the son of the Levanter, offering his services to any would-be buyer through interviews with whoever passes through the corner of Damascus where he is hiding. At first glance, the Levanter may appear attractive to those engaged in sordid games. In the end, however, the Levanter must betray his existing paymaster in order to begin serving a new one. Four years ago, Bashar switched to the Tehran-Moscow axis and is now trying to switch back to the Tel-Aviv-Washington one that he and his father served for decades. However, if the story has one lesson to teach, it is that the Levanter is always the source of the problem, rather than part of the solution. ISIS is there because almost half a century of repression by the Assads produced the conditions for its emergence. What is needed is a policy based on the truth of the situation in which both Assad and ISIS are parts of the same problem.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Like Father, Like Son http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341622/opinion-like-father-like-son, Ashraq Al-Awsat (February 20, 2015).

Life , Money , Truth , Game

“In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message…
Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Arthur Jensen, "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould-fossils Contemporary Education Review 1:2, 1982

Books , Way , Literature , Appearance

“But we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one the 'great books' of the nineteenth century - one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

New Epilogue, p. 1214 (See also: Karl Marx - History - Statistics...)
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978)

Books , Education , History , Idea

“Posito I assume and when I say posito, I have the right to assume the unlikely; therefore posito, I assume that Mr. A. A., whose promises supposedly have not weakened him, went to work and wrote the system. Posito, I assume, and when I say posito, I have the right to assume what is more unreasonable than the most unreasonable; therefore; posito, I assume that if Mr. A. A. did not write the system, then Mr. B. B. wrote it-then what? Let us linger for a moment on this thought, with which, of course, we have all been familiar for several years: the thought of the prospect for the hope of the system. Therefore, in order to be very brief, posito, I assume that the system appeared here in Copenhagen, then what? Then one would indeed have to read it, unless Mr. C. C. would instantly be kind and philanthropic enough to promise a summary of the system and also position us in the point of view; then we would again be saved by the promise. If this does not happen, then of course one would have to read it. How troublesome, and who would finally benefit from that?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Prefaces, Nichol, 1997 p. 39-40
1840s, Prefaces (1844)

Hope , Appearance

“I should strive (on reading a book of poetry) to evoke the a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic and structural inherent in this organic form which is friendly to me and responds to my mood.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Goblins and Pagodas, 1916

Books , Soul , Mood

“A mother gave her children Aesop’s fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it’s much too childish and stupid. You can’t make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we’ve got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

“Similes, Parables and Fables” Parerga and Paralipomena
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Children , Books , Stupidity , Education

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep; Slowly, and then all at once.”

John Green book The Fault in Our Stars

Hazel Grace Lancaster, p. 125
Compare Ernest Hemingway, speaking about the process of going bankrupt: "'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

love , Cute , Romantic , Anniversary

“Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B. C. …There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

“You and me on the bobbing knee.
Didn't we cry at that old mythology he'd read!
I will come home again, but not until
The sun and the moon meet on yon hill.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Home , Sun , Cry

“Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972), Ch. 1.

Men , Hope , Light

“If we find, when we read again one of our classics—say Virgil for instance—that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 2
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life , Books , Beauty , Motivation

“[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Books , Birth , Tree

“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

A Gossip on Romance http://pages.prodigy.net/rogers99/rls_gossip_on_romance.html, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).

Books , Sleep , Dance

“Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.”

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

Quote in: Ken Johnsonoct. " Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/arts/design/lucy-r-lippard-and-conceptual-art-at-brooklyn-museum.html." in New York Times, Oct. 18, 2012.

Friendship , World , Art , Way

“Once I reveled in a destiny
like no other joy I'd known:
when the warden — reading
my death sentence — wept.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

I (Yo soy un hombre sincero) as translated by Esther Allen in José Martí : Selected Writings (2002), p. 273
Simple Verses (1891)

Death , Joy

“This outcome is supported by the facts we have found – but I also know these findings may not be consistent with some people’s expectations. To all those who have closely followed this case, and who have engaged in the important national dialogue it has inspired, I urge you to read this report in full.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

People , Support

“But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy.
When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work.
When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity.
When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Secret , Beauty , Sun , Painting

“A reading test measures one's ability to read reading tests, and reading tests are in themselves… somewhat akin to the world of crossword puzzles or Scrabble or the game of twenty questions. Some people play these games well, and all praise is due them for their skill. But if we ask, What aspect of the world do they comprehend in doing these games well? the answer is, Only the world within the games themselves.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

People , World , Game , Question

“So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

" My First Acquaintance with Poets http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/FirstAcquaintancePoets.htm" (1822)
The Plain Speaker (1826)

Life , Books , Thinking , Happiness

“I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

As quoted in Memorable Quotations: Jewish Writers of the Past (2005) edited by Carol A. Dingle.

Books

“Those who, like the present writer, never had the privilege of meeting Sidgwick can infer from his writings, and still more from the characteristic philosophic merits of such pupils of his as McTaggart and Moore, how acute and painstaking a thinker and how inspiring a teacher he must have been. Yet he has grave defects as a writer which have certainly detracted from his fame. His style is heavy and involved, and he seldom allowed that strong sense of humour, which is said to have made him a delightful conversationalist, to relieve the uniform dull dignity of his writing. He incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answers. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument: and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing. The result is that Sidgwick probably has far less influence at present than he ought to have, and less than many writers, such as Bradley, who were as superior to him in literary style as he was to them in ethical and philosophical acumen. Even a thoroughly second-rate thinker like T. H. Green, by diffusing a grateful and comforting aroma of ethical "uplift", has probably made far more undergraduates into prigs than Sidgwick will ever make into philosophers.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

Sense , Strong , Teachers

“Multiculturalists encourage vagueness about 'contributions' to give the impression of equal participation, as in the 'new age' school sports where every player in the team must handle the ball before a goal can be scored. If one were to compose a more precise ethnic history it would read something like this: The English, Irish and Scots were the founding population; they and their children established the Australian nation.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

Children , Age , School , History

“I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "The 7 Percent Solution", p. 255
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Life , Learning

“I lead a simple life now, I am foolish, an old man in love, a dreamer who dreams of nothing but reading to Allie and holding her whenever I can. I am a sinner with many faults and a man who believes in magic, but I am too old to change and too old to care.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Duke, Winter for Two, p. 212
1990s, The Notebook (1996)

Love , Life , Dreams , Change

“One of the reasons I was asked to do the portrait [of president J. F. Kennedy, winter of 1962–63, destined for the Truman Library, Independence, Mo] is that, with luck, I can start and finish a life-size portrait in one sitting (after a couple of preliminary sessions of sketches to determine the pose and familiarize myself with my impression of the sitter). After years of working on my portraits (mostly of friends) for months at a time, I found myself getting bogged down in overly conscientious effort and discovered that by working swiftly I could enter into an almost passive relationship to the canvas and get closer to the essential gesture of the sitter. However, working at top speed this way, I require the absolute immobility of the sitter. This was impossible with President Kennedy because of his extreme restlessness: he read papers, talked on the phone, jotted down notes, crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted from one arm of the chair to another, always in action at rest. So I had to find a new approach.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Painting a Portrait of the President', Elaine de Kooning (1964)

Life , Way , Effort , Winter

“I can read his lips, and he is not praying.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

Catch Phrases
Source: http://www.sportscenteraltar.com/phrases/phrases.asp Sports Center Catchphrases

“How could that have happened? … Even if it was a hand of God … I’d read – and I don’t know how they know this – but in approximately 3000 BC there was a massive undersea volcano and earthquake, which created a tsunami wave that had to have been a couple of hundred feet high. Just off the heel of Italy. Diagonally across you’re staring right up the mouth of the Nile, so I’m wondering if that had anything to do with that.”

Ridley Scott (1937) English film director and film producer

On the parting of the Red Sea in the tales of Moses, as quoted in "Exodus: Gods And Kings - How Ridley Scott And Christian Bale Are Rebooting The Biblical Epic" at Yahoo Movies (16 September 2014) https://uk.yahoo.com/movies/exodus-gods-and-kings-set-visit-97667462271.html

God

“You served here how long, Cornelius?’
‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’
‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonized people. We’re here to give orders.
‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

People , Books , Religion , Confidence

“The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not; he must take care not to be the slave of his symbols, but always to have before his mind the realities which they merely serve to express. For these and other reasons it seems to me of the highest importance that a mathematician should be trained in no narrow school; a wide course of reading in the first few years of his mathematical study cannot fail to influence for good the character of the whole of his subsequent work”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 467 : On the importance of broad training

School , Mathematics , Reality , Effort

“Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 13, Bits & Pieces, p. 130.

“There is a war on men, and [feminists] are very open about it. They don't conceal it; they brag about it. You read all of their material – they're always saying they want to abolish the patriarchy. They said that husbands are not necessary in a marriage, they're not necessary in raising children.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Men , Marriage , War , Children

“I was thrilled, and I mean really thrilled, when I read that parts of the Merzbau could still be buried under the ruins. Whatever the circumstances. I will try and come to Hannover to salvage it.... wait until I arrive, for the Merzbau is made of plaster of Paris and could easily be damaged. However by working slowly I am sure I can save parts. And it is certainly worth it, because it [his 'Merzbau'] is my life's work. And in the opinion of people abroad it was seen as a new form of art.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 47 : in a letter to Käthe Steinitz (24 June 1945)

Life , People , Art , Waiting

“This book can be read as an argument that social democracy is not enough and we can establish something better than social democracy. The explanatory ideas of False Necessity provide an understanding of society that presents the institutional arrangements on which the social democrat relies as the relatively contingent and revisable outcome of a particular sequence of practical and imaginative conflicts. More generally, these explanatory arguments support a view of social reality within which the rejection of social democracy seems reasonable. The programmatic ideas propose an alternative to social democracy that realizes more fully the ideals that the social democrat can only imperfectly achieve and radically redefines these ideals in the course of realizing them.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 26

Books , Democracy , Imagination , Idea

“The idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. We have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group - there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent. If you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the Kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. They were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the Kulaks was the death of six million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930's. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It's precisely this sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. Just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Death , People , History , Idea

“Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

The Process Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 49.

People , Age , Fear , Time

“My mother's favourite paraphrase is one known in our house as David's because it was the last he learned to repeat. It was also the last thing she read —
Art thou afraid his power shall fail When comes thy evil day? And can an all-creating arm Grow weary or decay?
I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her timid face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the dawning, alas for me, I was afraid.”

J. M. Barrie book Margaret Ogilvy

Source: Margaret Ogilvy (1897), Ch. 10

Art , Courage , Learning , Evil

“As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It‘s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

Source: Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007), Chapter 2 “Requin” section 4 (pp. 100-101)

Pleasure , History , Decision

“I don't understand how many painters can be so short-sighted to value art from earlier periods as completely worthless. Every art is an expression of an era and only for that reason already it is interesting. A Rembrandt has gone other ways, but he has certainly also pursued the highest goals. That one can assert: it is not necessary for a painter to have an impression when he is painting an Image, is nonsense. Certainly an artist, if he is really an artist, always has an inner urge to create an Image and thus sees an impression for himself that he may not always be able to explain, because deeper feelings are very difficult to grasp in words, but he has an impression - otherwise he only makes paintings as pure brain work. And intellectual art I can't bear. You can not make abstract art as something on its own. One feel various forms in their inner coherence. For example: when reading a fairy tale I can get the idea to paint a forest in completely abstract forms with motifs of trees. Every abstract form has an inner meaning for me.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Ik begrijp niet hoe veel schilders zo kortzichtig kunnen zijn kunst uit vroegere perioden als volkomen waardeloos aan te merken. Elke kunst is een uiting van een tijdperk en alleen daarom al interessant. Een Rembrandt is andere wegen gegaan maar heeft zeker ook de hoogste doelen nagestreefd. Dat men beweren kan: een schilder hoeft bij het schilderen van een Bild geen voorstelling te hebben, is onzin. Zeker heeft een kunstenaar, als hij werkelijk artiest is, altijd een innerlijke drang een Bild te scheppen en ziet dus een Bild voor zich dat hij misschien niet altijd verklaren kan omdat diepere gevoelens heel moeilijk in woorden te vatten zijn, maar een voorstelling heeft hij - anders maakt hij schilderijen en is het puur hersenwerk. En intellectuele kunst staat mij zeer tegen. Abstracte kunst is niet op zich zelf staand te maken. Men voelt verscheidene vormen in hun innerlijke samenhang. Bijvoorbeeld: bij het lezen van een sprookje kan ik de ingeving krijgen een bos in geheel abstracte vormen met boommotieven te schilderen. Elke abstracte vorm heeft voor mij een innerlijke betekenis.
Quote of Jacoba van Heemskerck in her letter of 1 May 1920, to Gustave Bock in Giessen, Germany; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5) Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 168
1920's

Art , Way , Feeling , Idea