On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.
“What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”
Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 25
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Louis L'Amour 65
Novelist, short story writer 1908–1988Related quotes
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
From a conversation with Peter Porter broadcast on ABC Radio, Australia in the program 'Book Talk' on Saturday 15 October 2005
Television and radio
Quote in Dubuffet's letter to American art-promoter Gould, dated 4 August 1946; as cited in Physiognomic Illegibility, by Kent Mitchell Minturn - JEAN DUBUFFET'S POSTWAR PORTRAITS https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/people/faculty/minturnPDFs/Minturn%20Final%20(low%20res).pdf
1940's
“A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”
Source: Education of a Wandering Man
“My success will not depend on what A or B thinks of me. My success will be what I make of my work.”
Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,