“He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?
Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?”

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

“Reading activates and exercises the mind.
Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts.
Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.”

“Can we suppose anything more hateful or even more execrable to God than this fiction of asking the pardon of sins, while he who asks at the very time either thinks that he is not a sinner, or, at least, is not thinking that he is a sinner; in other words, a fiction by which God is plainly held in derision?”

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

“…when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.”

“What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves…. He must have the passion of a lover.”

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”

“If you said more words to him than "mommy'll be back", he might know something!”

“He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.”