“Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.”

— William Penn

Advice to his children (1699)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseles…" by William Penn?

William Penn 53

English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker… 1644–1718

Related quotes

“So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Source: Jurgen (1919), Ch. 37 : Invention of the Lovely Vampire
Context: Let us extinguish this candle says Jurgen, "for I have seen so many flames to-day that my eyes are tired."
So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen. And now they were in utter darkness, and in the dark nobody can see what is happening. But that Florimel now trusted Jurgen and his Noumarian claims was evinced by her very first remark.
"I was in the beginning suspicious of your majesty," said Florimel, "because I had always heard that every emperor carried a magnificent sceptre, and you then displayed nothing of the sort. But now, somehow, I do not doubt you any longer. And of what is your majesty thinking?"
"Why, I was reflecting, my dear," says Jurgen, "that my father imagines things very satisfactorily."

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order

“Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.”

Tamora Pierce book Emperor Mage

Source: Emperor Mage

“To many, perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great scholars, past and present, 'Celtic' of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. … Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

English and Welsh (1955)

“Absence extinguishes the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

L'absence diminue les médiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent éteint les bougies et allume le feu.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QSdPNfXQavAC&q=%22L'absence+diminue+les+m%C3%A9diocres+passions+et+augmente+les+grandes+comme+le+vent+%C3%A9teint+les+bougies+et+allume+le+feu%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage
Variant translation: Absence weakens the minor passions and adds to the effects of great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
Maxim 276.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Of Atheism
A short Schem of the true Religion
Context: Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.