“Read in order to live.”

—  Gustave Flaubert

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Read in order to live." by Gustave Flaubert?
Gustave Flaubert photo
Gustave Flaubert 98
French writer (1821–1880) 1821–1880

Related quotes

Gustave Flaubert photo

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie
Variant: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Context: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)

Geoffrey Nunberg photo

“Psychoanalysis is unlikely to be repealed; people are not going to go back to reading novels in order to understand themselves and their lives.”

Geoffrey Nunberg (1945) American linguist

Geoffrey Nunberg (1983) The Decline of Grammar http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97mar/halpern/nunberg.htm, The Atlantic, December 1983 http://books.google.com/books?id=JuUmAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Psychoanalysis+is+unlikely+to+be+repealed+people+are+not+going+to+go+back+to+reading+novels+in+order+to+understand+themselves+and+their+lives%22&pg=PA38#v=onepage

Garrison Keillor photo

“One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

“It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. An improvement in one's language abilities is therefore... observed in changes in one's purposes, perceptions, and evaluations. Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art. "Art," he said in Quintessence of Ibsenismn, "should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self knowledge, self-control, precision of action and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialty and vulgarity." …For my purposes, if you replace the word "art" with the phrase "language education," you will have a precise statement of what I have been trying to say.

“Did you read the book or did you just read the words in order?”

Gail Giles (1955) American writer

Source: Right Behind You

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

in an interview http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n12/htdocs/ursula-k-le-guin-440.php?country=uk in Vice Magazine.
Context: Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.

Dorothy Day photo

“I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky … by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.)”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

"On Pilgrimage," Catholic Worker (December 1968)
Context: I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky … by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.

Arno Allan Penzias photo

“Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.”

Arno Allan Penzias (1933) American physicist

interview, The Voice of Genius, published in 1995.

Edwin Boring photo

“Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension … he is right … most of the time.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Edwin Boring, "Elementist Going Up", The Scientific Monthly (March 1953), p. 183

Related topics