Quoted in the tribute of The Lost Symbol (2009) by Dan Brown
The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)
Context: A nation with culture is blessed. To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. It has always seemed to me that symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education. The young are no longer invited to seek the hidden truths, dynamic and eternal, locked within the shapes and behavior of living beings.
“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”
Source: The Lost Symbol
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Dan Brown 135
American author 1964Related quotes
“What in the world would we do without our libraries?”
And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was.
"Ministers of Justice", Address delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Convention of the Tennessee Bar Association at Gatlinburg, June 5, 1963; published in 31 Tennessee Law Review 1 (Fall 1963), p. 19.
“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”
Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 79
The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.
One Human Minute (1986)