Quotes about read (4775 quotes, page 40)

“His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

E. M. Forster, Introduction to Lampedusa's Two Stories and a Memory (New York: Pantheon, 1962) p. 13.
Criticism

Life , Way , Reading

“A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Robert Skipwith (3 August 1771) http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-02_Bk.html#hd_lf054.2.head.010 ; also in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 4, p. 239 http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC61981280&id=YjaXnbNMaccC&pg=RA6-PA239&lpg=RA6-PA239&dq=Bergh+%22volumes+of+ethics,+and+divinity%22
1770s

Sense , Reading , Daughters

“Traditionalists may be shocked by the opinions expressed here; others will come to welcome them. Regardless of your own views, The Christian Agnostic demands to be read and pondered.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Description from back cover
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Reading

“Dear Sir Joshua, - I am just to write what I fear you will not read - after lying in a dying state for 6 months [in reality much shorter]. The extreme affection which I am informed of by a Friend which Sir Joshua has expresd induces me to beg a last favor, which is to come once under my Roof and look at my things, my woodman you never saw, if what I ask now is not disagreeable to your feeling that I may have the honour to speak to you. I can from a sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely loved Sir Joshua Reynolds. 'Tho. Gainsborough.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

A last letter of Gainsborough to Sir Joshua Reynolds, End of July 1788; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 307
Gainsborough, on the occasion of that last visit, actually had many of his unfinished canvases brought to his bedside to show to Sir Joshua
1770 - 1788

Love , Fear , Feeling , Lying

“Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 42

Books , Solitude , Freedom , Chance

“Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"The Devil’s Advice to Story-tellers," lines 19–22, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

Motivation , Reading , Despair

“There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

p, 125
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

History , Mathematics , Idea , Science

“I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. […] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§23
'Tis (2000)

People , Books , Fools , Girl

“There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters, you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

New York Times, December 20, 1931.

Music , Idea , Reading

“I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily the popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. […] I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me!”

Wú Chéng'ēn (1500–1582) Chinese writer

Preface to a collection of short stories about monsters, now lost, as quoted in Arthur Waley's introduction to the American edition of Monkey (New York: Grove Press, 1943)

Love , Secret , Fear , School

“I have read in the Book of Revelation the power of the word of testimony, but I never realised what power was in a martyr's testimony. If I had brought a ton of explosives and let them off in that Assembly it could not have had a greater effect. That vast Assembly erupted, and the books started to fly and the punches started to be thrown, and the kicking started, but I held my ground and maintained my testimony. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EUROPE TODAY AND EUROPE IN REFORMATION TIMES. This afternoon I read again the story of Luther, at the Diet of Worms. Who presided over the Diet of Worms? The Emperor Charles, Head of the Holy Roman Empire. Who was he? He was a Habsburg. It is interesting to note that one of the men who attacked me is the last of the Habsburgs-Otto Habsburg, the Pretender to the Crown of Austria and Hungary. I said to myself, 'The Habsburgs are still lusting for Protestant blood. They are still the same as they were in the days of Luther.”

Ian Paisley (1926–2014) Politician and former church minister

The members of the Roman Catholic Party of Mr. Le Pen of which John Taylor is a member were round me battering away at me as hard as they could"
None Dare Call Him Antichrist Sermon, Martyrs' Memorial Free Presbyterian Church, October 16, 1988.

Men , Books , Time , Reading

“If children will read comics […] isn't it advisable to give them some constructive comics to read? […] The wish to be super strong is a healthy wish, a vital compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build this innner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world. Certainly there can be no arguement about the advisability of strengthening the fundamental human desire, too often buried beneath stultifying divertissments and disguises, to see god overcome evil.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

"Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics", The American Scholar, 13.1 (1943): p 40, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, pp. 9-10; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn,

God , Children , World , Nature

“He then goes a step further and briefly imposes a Freudian reading on the text, a reading outdated and crude even in the current Western context of cultural criticism. He says the depiction of 'the other' in Ramayana can be understood as a projection of the unfulfilled sexual desires of traditional Indians. …. The motive of applying a totally alien framework, viz., the Freudian one, to a traditional Hindu text is something that is questionable.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Motivation , Question , Reading

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"
And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood — that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze.
1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)

Books , World , School , Girl

“My beloved brothers and sisters. On the globe, several incidents have occurred that make it necessary for us to speak about them, and guide the Muslims in their regard… It's important for us to know that as Muslims, we don't understand what part of Islam these people [terrorists] are following. In fact, we don't even understand what Islam they are following, because Islam is a totally different religion from what these people are practicing… As frustrated as we might be because of what might be happening on Muslim lands, it does not give us the right to go out and hurt people who are not at all involved… If you have a problem with someone, you may report them to the authorities. And then it will handled by the courts. You will either get justice at the courts or sometimes maybe the courts may find someone that you believe is guilty, innocent. In that case, you leave it for the day of judgment, when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will be judge. But you do not take it into your own hands, to say now because the court has found this person innocent, and according to me the person is guilty, "Let me harm them, let me kill them, let me hurt them, let me rob from them". That is absolutely incorrect and it is un-Islamic… Two wrongs do not make a right, remember this… If someone has murdered someone else, Subhan Allah, it does not give us the right to murder a third party altogether. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala protect us, and may Allah grant us guidance and ease. It's important we understand this. The world is bleeding today, and people are blaming the Muslims! Because from amongst us, some are being brainwashed. Brainwashed by what? They do not understand verses of the Quran. They don't understand the Asbab al-Nuzul, or reasons of the revelation of the verses of the Quran. They don't understand how to extract rules and regulations from verses of the Quran. They read something, someone shows them something and next thing they are prepared to give up their lives. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grant us an understanding. We should be giving up our lives striving to earn the pleasure of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala through obedience, through Salah. Look at Muhammad sallā llāhu 'alay-hi wa-sallam when he went to Ta'if, look at his example. They beat him up personally, physically, he was bleeding and the angels came to him to say "If you want, we can crush these people between the mountains". What did he say? He said "I am sent as a mercy. We don't want that to happen. If they don't accept, perhaps their children will accept."”

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

Patience, Sabr... And we think that the non-Muslims are our enemies – the minute we think that, automatically we will not be able to call them towards Islam. And they will get the wrong image of Islam. My brothers and sisters, Islam, it means peace, it stands for peace, it promotes peace, it teaches peace, and everything that you will achieve is peace. In this world peace, in the next peace, in your grave peace, with your children peace, in your environment peace. That is Islam. Anything that destroys that in any way is not Islam. Remember this.
"Islam Condemns Terrorism - Powerful Reminder - Mufti Ismail Menk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6O2anxz7CM, YouTube (2015)
Lectures

Children , People , Pleasure , World

“Everyone who has read your book are unanimous in their judgment. They all think it is politically harmful for us. There is no point in giving it for an evaluation to the writers Fedin, Leonov, Ehrenburg, etc. The reviewers could have made a mistake in their aesthetic judgment but they were unanimous in their political judgment, and I have no doubt that their political judgment is absolutely correct.”

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) Soviet writer and journalist who originally trained as an engineer

1960s

Books , Thinking , Reading

“Do you have the poems of Han-shan in your house?
They're better for you than sutra reading!
Write them out and paste them on a screen
Where you can glance over them from time to time”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

Time , Reading , Past , Housing

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to an atheist (24 March 1954), p. 43
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

God , Lie , World , Science

“Yes. Basically, I can read your photography [of Wolfgang Tillmans, who is interviewing her] and see what moves you. What really moves you and not just faked emotion. I don't think it's good when it's like that in art – but unfortunately it often is. That's why I like Bruce Nauman, for example, as a sculptor. With his work, sometimes I have really thought to myself, that's simply beautiful... Above all, it is difficult enough to depict something that moves you deep down inside. But that's ultimately what art is all about, and that's also what appeals to people – if an artist can do it.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

People , Beauty , Art , Thinking

“Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. […] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an acive agent, not merely a “reporter.””

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Introduction, p. 6
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

People , History , Study , Reading

“I was kind of solitary. I'd spend a lot of time on my own, reading books. I didn't integrate very well.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

On Life, on his time at school.
Notes from a library bar (2006)

Books , Time , Reading

“It seems no matter what I read I think "this is not harry potter."”

Hank Green (1980) American vlogger

This is not Harry Potter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZaCxfiUHs
Songs

Thinking , Reading

“This world is a pretty good place under normal conditions, but anyone who’s read Russian history knows what a bad place it can be.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

The cowboy in autumn https://world.wng.org/2016/04/the_cowboy_in_autumn (May 14, 2016)

World , History , Reading

“I first listen to someone who speaks the language and who reads the lyrics to me. I pay great attention to pronunciation. Once I hear the words spoken, I write the song lines phonetically in Hindi and then sing. By the grace of god, my songs in other languages – including Bengali – have been appreciated. People say they are good and the words have been correctly pronounced.”

Lata Mangeshkar (1929) Indian singer

Above two quotes about her singing in Urdu and other languages in Lata Mangeshkar has to thank Dilip Kumar for her Urdu skills!, 29 Npvember 2013, India Today http://www.deccanherald.com/content/10118/,

God , People , Singing , Reading

“[I did] Some [reading to prep for Expelled]. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler, and that was a very interesting book--one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin's theory--supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus--led to the murder of millions of innocent people.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Interviews: Ben Stein is Expelled! Christianity Today Movies, Christianity Today Movies: Interview with Ben Stein, 15 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/benstein.html,

People , Books , Reading

“Every word of Truth proceeds from God, whether that Truth be written in the rocks and read by the geologist or written in the heavens and read by the astronomer or written in the heart of man or written in this old book”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

God , Truth , Books , Reading

“[The office of the interpreter] is to read Scripture like any other book.”

Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) Theologian, classical scholar, and academic administrator

On the interpretation of Scripture http://www.bible-researcher.com/jowett1.html

Books , Reading

“I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?"
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!"
"Yes," I replied.
"I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Life , People , Pleasure , Communication

“Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 144
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Learning , Reading

“As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with pow[d]ered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cvneu0$29s$1@reader2.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

Time , Reading

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Bk. V, Ch. 1
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)
Original: (de) Man sollte alle Tage wenigstens ein kleines Lied hören, ein gutes Gedicht lesen, ein treffliches Gemälde sehen und, wenn es möglich zu machen wäre, einige vernünftige Worte sprechen.

Reading

“Senator Smoot is an institute
Not to be bribed with pelf;
He guards our homes from erotic tomes
By reading them all himself.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Smoot Smites Smut

Home , Reading

“Your mother waits, heart-weary, at the door.
Your child in hunger cries for its chewed rice.
I feed your mother, serving as her son,
and like a father teach your child to read.”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 157–160

Hunger , Waiting , Reading , Heart

“All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Feeling , Boy , Reading

“"Let's dicker, Lord Lyons," Lincoln said; the British minister needed a moment to understand he meant bargain. Lincoln gave him that moment, reaching into a desk drawer and drawing out a folded sheet of paper that he set on top of the desk. "I have here, sir, a proclamation declaring all Negroes held in bondage in those areas now in rebellion against the lawful government of the United States to be freed as of next January first. I had been saving this proclamation against a Union victory, but circumstances being as they are-" Lord Lyons spread his hands with genuine regret. "Had you won such a victory, Mr. President, I should not be visiting you today with the melancholy message I bear from my government. You know, sir, that I personally despise the institution of chattel slavery and everything associated with it." He waited for Lincoln to nod before continuing. "That said, however, I must tell you that an emancipation proclamation issued after the series of defeats Federal forces have suffered would be perceived as a cri de coeur, a call for servile insurrection to aid your flagging cause, and as such would not be favorably received in either London or Paris, to say nothing of its probable effect in Richmond. I am sorry, Mr. President, but this is not the way out of your dilemma." Lincoln unfolded the paper on which he'd written the decree abolishing slavery in the seceding states, put on a pair of spectacles to read it, sighed, folded it again, and returned it to its drawer without offering to show it to Lord Lyons. "If that doesn't help us, sir, I don't know what will," he said. His long, narrow face twisted, as if he were in physical pain. "Of course, what you're telling me is that nothing helps us, nothing at all."”

Harry Turtledove book The Great War: American Front

Source: The Great War: American Front (1998), p. 7

Pain , Law , Way , Understanding

“The brutality of the Old Testament inspired me, the stories and grand gestures. I wrote that stuff up and it influenced the way I saw the world. What I'm trying to say is I didn't walk around in a rage thinking God is a hateful god. I was influenced by looking at the Bible, and it suited me in my life vision at the time to see things in that way. …. After a while I started to feel a little kinder and warmer to the world, and at the same time started to read the New Testament.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

"Interview with Old Nick" http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/feb/23/popandrock.features, The Guardian (February 23, 2008)
God and religion

Life , God , Hate , World

“As a trustee of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland I have read many applications for help in the payment of University class fees on behalf of would-be students from crofts in the remotest regions of the Highlands and Islands. It was impossible to read them without emotion and admiration, for they displayed in their simple words a spirit of courage and of aspiration undaunted by hardship which went to one's heart.”

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan (1873–1952) British judge

Source: A Man of Law's Tale (1952), On Education, p. 14

Courage , Universe , Reading , Help

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.”

Daniel Handler book The Penultimate Peril

The Penultimate Peril (2005)

Life , World , Learning , Reading

“I am myself convinced that the existing law on abortion is uncertain and is also, and perhaps more importantly, harsh and archaic and that it is in urgent need of reform. I certainly shall have no hesitation in voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. I take this view because I believe that we have here a major social problem. How can anyone believe otherwise when perhaps as many as 100,000 illegal operations a year take place, that the present law has shown itself quite unable to deal with the problem? I believe this, too, because of the danger which exists at present to those who are forced to resort to back-street abortionists and to the misery which is caused to some of those who fail to get an abortion. I believe it also because we all know…that the law is consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one law for the poor.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1966/jul/22/medical-termination-of-pregnancy-bill in the House of Commons in favour of the Bill legalising abortion (22 July 1966)
1960s

Law , Question , Problem , Reading

“I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books."”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, “Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence.” The Ethical Culture Society and the Center for Inquiry, New York, NY, November 16, 2005 (broadcast on CSPAN-2)
2000s

God , Books , World , Reading

“I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume III, chapter VI: "Miscellanea", page 252 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=264&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to William Ogle (22 February 1882)
Ogle had translated Aristotle's Parts of Animals and sent Darwin a copy.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

God , Books , Way , Reading

“To be honest, I haven't even seen the film yet. Tobey, if you're reading this, I apologize.”

Eliza Dushku (1980) American actress

Moxie Lady by Michael Moses http://www.elizadushkuonline.com/html_articles/2002/09_total-movie-and-entertainment.html
Regarding the Spider-Man film.

Reading

“By the time you read this
I will be so far away
Daddy longlegs, how in the world
Am I to be expected to stay?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Have One On Me
Have One On Me (2010)

World , Time , Reading

“.. before being hypnotized, she could not distinguish the capitals in the advertising columns of a newspaper. After being hypnotized, however, she could, in a few minutes, see to read the large and second heading of the newspaper, and next day, to make herself a blond cap, threading her needle WITHOUT the aid of glasses.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Hypnotising for improvement of eyesight, in “Neurypnology; or, The rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation ...”, p. 68.

Reading

“Revelation can be supplemented by reason. Christ Himself gave reasons for His belief, and put in modern form, these reasons are, to my mind, conclusive. You remember the passage in the earliest Gospel: "But as touching the dead, that they are raised; have ye not read in the book of Moses, in the place concerning the bush, how God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living: ye do greatly err" (Mark xii, 26 R. V.) Herein, in a form adapted to Jewish thought is "the one great argument which has made most sincere believers in God believers in Immortality also.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

citing H. Rashdall: Doctrine and Development, Methuen, 1898 p. 177.
Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)

God , Books , Reading , Christ

“The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading…It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Love , Children , Pleasure , Books

“But you can't read history at an illiterate stage / And you can't raise a family on minimum wage”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Harlem Streets
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Family , History , Reading

“Science Digest asked me to see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and write an article for them on the science it contained. I saw the picture and was appalled. I remained appalled even after a doctor’s examination had assured me that no internal organs had been shaken loose by its ridiculous soundwaves. (If you can’t be good, be loud, some say, and Close Encounters was very loud.) … Hollywood must deal with large audiences, most of whom are utterly unfamiliar with good science fiction. It has to bend to them, meet them at least half-way. Fully appreciating that, I could enjoy Planet of the Apes and Star Wars. Star Wars was entertainment for the masses and did not try to be anything more. Leave your sophistication at the door, get into the spirit, and you can have a fun ride. … Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions, or reading a bad book for the dirty parts. Optical wizardry is something a movie can do that a book can’t but it is no substitute for a story, for logic, for meaning. It is ornamentation, not substance. In fact, whenever a science fiction picture is praised overeffusively for its special effects, I know it’s a bad picture. Is that all they can find to talk about?”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Editorial: The Reluctant Critic", in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 6, (12 November 1978) https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v02n06_1978-11-12/
General sources

War , Books , Way , Star

“It was with deep emotion that we read the announcement issued by the Council of Flanders at its plenary meeting of June 20, 1918, because it give expression to the fact that considerable and important sections of the Belgian people are advocating Germany's right to figure in the Belgian question, and that the voice of agitation over that which they have suffered is overtopped by the voice of consanguinity with the Teutonic race.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Source: 1910s, Speech in the Reichstag, 21 June 1918, p. 179.

People , Question , Suffering , Reading

“However, the only way these arguments acquire any purchase is in the context of an international, read western, commitment to Jewish supremacy, wherein Jews are seen as white Europeans defending white European values and civilization against the primitive Arab hordes.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Way , Reading

“[To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 27

Life , Men , Drink , Strong

“… I began at the beginning, and read Hind's Logic, Whately's Logic, Reid's Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. But the book which was of most use to me on these subjects was Stewart's Elements. I found on odd volume of this in my father's study at Hauxwell. It attracted me; I read and re-read it with increasing satisfaction. To Dugald Stewart, an author now obsolete, I owe the first infusion of a taste for philosophical inquiry…..”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Memoirs (1885)

Books , Sense , Study , Reading

“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Books , Reading

“Dr. Grant took me occasionally to the meetings of the Wernerian Society, where various papers on natural history were read, discussed, and afterwards published in the 'Transactions.' I heard Audubon deliver there some interesting discourses on the habits of N. American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Waterton. By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton, and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently: he gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", page 40 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=58&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Way , Travel , History , Intelligence

“It isn’t surprising that Trump would be reading Jihad Watch. … What makes this striking is that Trump made no secret of reading this site, unlike numerous others who are so afraid of the politically correct thought police that they read it in secret — even back when I was giving seminars for the U. S. military on the terrorist mindset, one colonel urged me not to say that I had been there, so afraid was he of Hamas-linked CAIR. It’s long past time to stop that kind of kowtowing. Those of us who are defending human rights against jihad terror and Sharia oppression have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of, and must not accept the enemy characterization of us, as that characterization itself is just a weapon in their arsenal and an attempt to clear away opposition to jihad and Sharia. It’s good news that the corrupt media is being passed over in favor of the truth tellers. Kudos to Trump for not bowing to the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion.”

Robert Spencer Jihad Watch

After Donald Trump linked to a Jihad Watch post http://web.archive.org/web/20160803132925/https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10157422799195725 on his Facebook account. Donald Trump links to Jihad Watch story on Facebook http://web.archive.org/web/20160810201416/https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/08/donald-trump-links-to-jihad-watch-story-on-facebook (August 3, 2016), Jihad Watch.

Truth , Secret , Feeling , Time

“In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

The Creators, The New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2013 http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m4/ferren.html,

Reading

“It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being “exposed.” As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 231

Life , Men , Fear , Game

“I soon began writing out my whole prayer and reading it back to God. Previously I'd get no further than "Dear God" and I'd already be thinking of the person I was going to meet for lunch or the board meeting agenda or what my family members and I would be doing later that evening. But when I began to move pen across paper, it became much easier to remain focused.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God , Family , Thinking , Reading

“I've studied Ulysses in depth and still think it's a great and ground-breaking book, a brave and sincere trail-blazer — but also massively self-indulgent, baggy, and irritating.
Joyce was a wonderful liberator, but his approach is dangerous for a writer to emulate, since he had a massive ego and was convinced that every word he wrote was sacred. Have you seen his annotated proofs? He scarcely ever deleted a word, just added screeds and screeds more stuff in the margins. He also believed that people should, and would, read novels with the same slow, studious pondering of every word and phrase that they bring to ancient scripture, which I think is a stupid thing for a storyteller to expect.”

Michel Faber (1960) novelist

Interview at Canongate http://www.canongate.net/MichelFaber

People , Books , Stupidity , Thinking

“I was very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Brochner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the conclusion that here was a task for one who understood the thinkers of the two directions, who did not mutually understand one another. I thought that in philosophy, too, I knew what I wanted, and saw a road open in front of me.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Reminiscences of my Childhood and Youth (1906), pp. 276–277

History , Understanding , Thinking , Study

“It won't be inconvenient to read our name if people treat each other with open minds.”

Kolas Yotaka (1974) Taiwanese politician

Kolas Yotaka (2018) cited in " New Cabinet spokeswoman describes her role as 'translator' http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201807270009.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 27 July 2018

People , Reading

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

the lowest thing I can think of at this time
Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Thinking , Time , Reading

“Maybe knowledge doesn't accrue, maybe it doesn't happen sequentially. Maybe I need to go back and read Hunger of Memory again. Maybe there's a wisdom that I had in those years that I need to learn from now. And maybe there will be a year when I will have the courage to read that book. When I think about it or when I hear other people talk about it, it strikes me as very naked prose, and I'm embarrassed by it. I'm embarrassed by how much I told you. And people say, "Well you didn't tell us you were gay." Or "You didn't tell us you had all these friends or that you were student body president. You never said that."”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

I think to myself, "My God, but what I told you I've never told anybody. And I'll never tell anybody again."
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Wisdom , Hunger , God , People

“When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 194
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Men , Reading , Painting

“Most writers have no other quality than the reader: taste. But the latter has the better taste, because he does not write - and the best if he does not read.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Reading

“I’ve spent a lot of time in London over the last few years and I liked the idea of the Mughal emperor Babur meeting with modern-day disaffected youth and talking to them about their actions. He was a sharp literary critic who could be very sweeping and cruel about poetry if he thought it was bad poetry, and he said some fantastic things that I quoted word for word in the opera. I read the Baburnama – the memoirs of Babur – and quoted lines from it. “Writing badly will make you ill.” What a beautiful thing to say. I read that book and I thought, how dramatic! If he had been a figure in western history it would have been an opera. War, murder, love, tragedy, poetry. It always jumped out at me as something worth doing.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Love , War , Books , Youth

“Temple, who was driving, suddenly faltered and wept. “I’ve read that libraries are where immortality lies.... I don’t want my thoughts to die with me.... I want to have done something.... I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution—know that my life has meaning. Right now, I’m talking about things at the very core of my existence.” I was stunned. As I stepped out of the car to say goodbye, I said, “I’m going to hug you. I hope you don’t mind.””

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) British neurologist and writer

I hugged her—and (I think) she hugged me back.
An Anthropologist On Mars, The New Yorker, 27 December 1993

Life , Money , Hope , Cars

“Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;—they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Soul , Thinking , Reading

“One does not need to have the authentic Hittite nose to be a Jew; the term Jew rather denotes a special way of thinking and feeling. A man can very soon become a Jew without being an Israelite; often it needs only to have frequent intercourse with Jews, to read Jewish newspapers, to accustom himself to Jewish philosophy, literature and art. On the other hand, it is senseless to call an Israelite a 'Jew', though his descent is beyond question, if he has succeeded in throwing off the fetters of Ezra and Nehemiah, and if the law of Moses has no place in his brain, and contempt of others no place in his heart.”

Houston Stewart Chamberlain book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)

Law , Art , Way , Feeling

“I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 56

Thinking , Reading

“Well, read my cheek, and watch my eye,—
Too strictly school'd are they,
One secret of my soul to show,
One hidden thought betray.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Source: The Venetian Bracelet (1829), Lines of Life

Secret , Soul , Reading

“Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 47

Reading

“Amazing. You're here, but you can't do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can't. Why not?"
"No one ever showed me how," I said.
He swayed about, looking solemn. "I quote," he said. "I'm very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools?”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Magids Series, The Merlin Conspiracy (2003), p. 113.

World , School , Quotes , Literature

“The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Death , Sex , Girl , Boy

“. The central theme of contemporary autonomist Marxism is a shift from giant organizations and insurrectional seizure to gradualism and Exodus. The rapid transformation of the working class, the blurring of the lines between work and the rest of life, and the shift in meeting a growing share of our needs into the informal and social economy, mean that the Old Left’s workerism (and like Harry Cleaver, I include syndicalism and council communism in the Old Left), its focus on the production process as the center of society, and its treatment of the industrial proletariat as the subject of history, have become obsolete. In this regard, read Toni Negri’s contrast of the Multitude to previous Old Left ideas of the proletariat. Mostly, I call it a heroic fantasy because any model that envisions a post-capitalist transition based on the universal adoption of any monolithic, schematized social model is as ridiculous as Socrates and Glaucon discussing what musical instruments and poetic metres will be permitted in the perfect state. The real world version of the post-capitalist transition — just as with the transition to capitalism five centuries earlier — isn’t a matter of any single cohesive social class, as the subject of history, systematically remaking the world guided by some single, comprehensive ideology, and organized around a uniform institutional model. It’s a matter of a wide variety of prefigurative institutions and technological building blocks that already exist in the present society, continuing to grow and coalesce together until they reach sufficient critical mass for a phase transition — a phase transition whose outlines can only be guessed at in the most general terms. This is the model advocated by Michel Bauwens, by Paul Mason, by John Holloway, by Peter Frase, and by a lot of other people who can hardly be fitted into any American individualist ghetto.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

'In Which the Anarcho-Syndicalists Discover C4SS' (2016)
Other Writing

Life , People , World , Music

“I was very sickly and weak during the first years of my infancy, and was, as much as I can remember of myself, a very whimsical boy. Sometimes I learned with enthusiasm, and often found myself in such a kind of ecstasy, that I neither could see nor hear what passed around me. In these fits of thought I forgot playthings and playfellows; I was happy only in my own musings. I always preferred the company of little girls to boys. I was not ten years old when I presented them with some poetry and little verses, the effusions of my heated imagination; some of them fell into my hands in riper years, and after reading them over, I left off poetry altogether. I loved my first private teacher very much; I even can remember him now. My second teacher was a simpleton; he could never understand me, nor enter into my feelings. My antipathy to this man grew daily greater; I could not learn of him, nor could he teach me anything. At last, when in my thirteenth year, I got rid of him, and he being encumbered with debts, I gave him my saving-box when he left. Whether I did this for pity's sake, or joy to get rid of him, I did not know.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Love , Feeling , Imagination , Girl

“The King determined to spare neither men nor money to carry on the war against the Hindoos: he accordingly directed Etibar Khan Yezdy, the Hawaldar of Condbeer (henceforth called Moortuza Nuggur), to collect all the troops under his command, with orders to march towards Beejanuggur, and to lay in ashes all the enemy’s towns in his route… Etibar Khan now proceeded to the town of Calistry, which he reached after a month’s march from Golconda. Here he destroyed the Hindoo idols, and ordered prayers to be read in the temples. These edifices may well he compared in magnificence with the buildings and paintings of China, with which they vie in beauty and workmanship. Having given a signal example of the Mahomedan power in that distant country, the Hindoos did not dare to interrupt his return…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Muhammad Qulî Qutb Shãh of Golconda (AD 1580-1612) Kalahasti (Tamil Nadu)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Men , Money , War , Beauty

“In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Journal (12 February 1772) after reading Some historical accounts of Guinea by Anthony Benezet
General sources

Books , Reading

“Hayek, highly influenced by Mach as a young man, began reading him immediately following his return from service in World War I. He remarked about four decades later that he was “stimulated by Mach’s work to study psychology and the physiology of the senses,” though his interest in these areas derived as much from disagreement as agreement with Mach’s work.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

War , World , Sense , Study

“Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1970) vol. 4, p. 147.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

History , Intelligence , Reading

“From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life , World , Winter , Reading

“They were both more than twenty-seven in those enthusiastic years of nineteen hundred and thirty-five, yet neither had as much as ever kissed a girl. Not that kissing was much in favour in that district. Reading about lovers kissing, Tarry often reflected on the fact that he had never seen anyone kissing anyone, except poor old Peter Toole whom he once saw kissing a corpse in a wakehouse in the hope of getting a couple of glasses of whiskey.”

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) poet

p11
Prose, Tarry Flynn (1948)

Hope , Girl , Lovers , Kiss

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted “It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time or don’t they?”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 9 (p. 154)

Lying , Time , Reading

“I fight, with myself in the ring of doubt and fear
The rain ain't gone, but I can still see clear
As a child, given religion with no answer to why
Just told believe in Jesus cause for me he did die
Curiosity killed the catechism
Understanding and wisdom became the rhythm that I played to
And became a slave to master self
A rich man is one with knowledge, happiness and his health
My mind had dealt with the books of Zen, Tao the lessons
of the Koran and Bible,
to me they all vital
And got truth within 'em, gotta read them boys
You just can't skim 'em, different branches of belief
But one root that stem 'em, but people of the venom try to trim 'em
And use religion as an emblem
When it should be a natural way of life
Who am I or they to say to whom you pray ain't right?
That's who got you doin' right and got you this far
Whether you say "in Jesus name" or "Al hum du'Allah"
Long as you know it's a being that's supreme to you
You let that show towards others in the things you do
Cause when the trumpets blowin', 24 elders surround the throne
Only 144,000 gon get home”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"G.O.D. (Gaining One's Definition)" (Track 7)
Albums, One Day It'll All Make Sense (1997)

Life , Wisdom , People , Health

“For Muslims the Quran is the Word of God; it is sacred scripture, not a work of "literature," a manual of law, or a text of theology, philosophy or history although it is of incomparable literary quality, contains many injunctions about a Sacred Law, is replete with verses of metaphysical, theological, and philosophical significance, and contains many accounts of sacred history. The unique structure of the Quran and the flow of its content constitute a particular challenge to most modern readers. For traditional Muslims the Quran is not a typical "read" or manual to be studied. For most of them, the most fruitful way of interacting with the Quran is not to sit down and read the Sacred Tex from cover to cover (although there are exceptions, such as completing the whole text during Ramadan). it is, rather, to recite a section with full awareness of it as the Word of God and to meditate upon it as one whose soul is being directly addressed, as the Prophet's soul was addressed during its revelation. … In this context it must be remembered that the Quran itself speaks constantly of the Origin and the Return, of all things coming from God and returning to Him, who himself has no origin or end. As the Word of god, the Quran also seems to have no beginning and no end. Certain turns of phrase and teachings about the Divine Reality, the human condition, the life of this world, and the Hereafter are often repeated, but they are not mere repetitions. Rather each iteration of a particular word, phrase, or verse opens the door of a hidden passage to other parts of the Quran. Each coda is always a prelude to an as yet undiscovered truth.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr book The Study Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary https://books.google.com/books?id=GVSzBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover (2015)

Life , God , Truth , World

“My definition of a great story has nothing to do with "a varied and interesting background." It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure. The business about a varied and interesting background belongs to my definition of a good story.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"From a Chain letter to George R. R. Martin and Greg Benford", 10 July 1982; as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

Pleasure , Business , Reading

“If your house has Cold Mountain poems
They are better for you than sutras
Hang them up where you can see them
Read them and read them again”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain , Reading , Housing

“The Poet's License! — 't is the right,
Within the rule of duty,
To look on all delightful things
Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars
That in the skies are glowing;
To see the gems of perfect dye
That in the woods are growing, —
And more than sage astronomer,
And more than learned florist,
To read the glorious homilies
Of Firmament and Forest.”

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) American poet

"The Poet's License".
The Masquerade and Other Poems (1866)

World , Beauty , Star , Learning

“Live always in the best company when you read.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 10
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Reading

“I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

La Bûche [The Log] (December 24, 1849)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

Reading

“I have written this work not to teach men what they do not know, but to remind them of what they already know and is very evident to them, for you will find in most of my words only things which most people know, and concerning which they entertain no doubts. But to the extent that they are well known and their truths revealed to all, so is forgetfulness in relation to them extremely prevalent. … It is possible that the reader will find that he has learned little after having read it that he did not know before. Its benefit is to be derived, rather, through review and persistent study, by which one is reminded of those things which, by nature, he is prone to forget and through which he is caused to take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Men , People , Truth , Nature

“When I read the gospels, I don’t see a wise and benevolent sage imparting truth. I see a religious extremist and faith-healer, who is just as much of a scam artist as any of the exorcists still practicing today. Remember that Jesus taught his disciples how to do faith healing too, just like tele-evangelists still do. Jesus didn’t believe in washing your hands because he didn’t know about pathogens. He believed in demons instead. And he cursed a fig tree because he didn’t know they were out-of-season. Likewise he didn’t know that the farmers of his day already knew about other seeds that were smaller than mustard seeds. My best evidence was Jesus’ complaint that the people who knew him since childhood wouldn’t buy any of his bullshit. So the only indications I had to believe in a historic Jesus were the very points that implied that he could not be a god nor have any real connection to God. So there are only two possibilities: Jesus was either an ignorant 1st century charlatan and cult leader heavily exaggerated like Robin Hood, or he’s a completely imaginary legendary figure like Hercules. Remember how Jesus said that he came not to bring peace but a sword; that he would divide husbands from their wives and children from their parents all on behalf of beliefs based on faith? Remember also that faith, (an unreasonable assertion of complete conviction which is not based on reason and is defended against all reason) —is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Any belief which requires faith should be rejected for that reason.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"Jesus never existed" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/03/jesus-never-existed/, Patheos (November 3, 2015)
Patheos

God , Children , People , Truth

“Management is not people, it is an activity like walking, reading, swimming or running. People who perform management can be designated as managers members of management, or executive leaders.
In addition, management is a distinct activity. It can be studied, knowledge about it obtained, and skill in its application acquired.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

Source: Principles of Management, 1960, p. 6 (6th ed. 1971)

People , Knowledge , Study , Reading

“I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it not for the quality of the tears: not those of vexation and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza. At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there was no freedom.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 63: Chapter 3. A disciple of Spinoza, an illustration

Fate , World , Understanding , Nature

“No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He dreamed of much for us, and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare …and always irreplaceable.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

Eulogy for Rod Serling (1975) Rodserling.com http://www.rodserling.com/full_roddenberry_quote.html

Dreams , Understanding , Time , Reading

“I had been warned about Mr. Truman's quick and violent temper and prejudices, but he radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor during our meeting. He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start. At the conference itself, he seemed to take great pride in his historical knowledge, but, it seemed to me that in spite of his having read much, it was of a superficial character, encompassing facts without the logic and reasoning dictating those facts. Of the Far East he knew little, presenting a strange combination of distorted history and vague hopes that somehow, some way, we could do something to help those struggling against Communism.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 361

Hope , Way , History , Communication

“… what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate … consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Small Orange Flags (2003)

Music , Reading , Forgetting

“This is the greatest political question of our time. How can we put an end to the empire of mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world. What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial. The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth. You probably heard that a half-truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our governments and media saying are 1/10 truths, 9/10 lies. And it doesn't take very many of them together to create a completely fictional world view (like the one that Bush presents when he talks). So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don't watch television news. Don't listen the news on radio. Don't read news from ordinary newspapers. Get it from variety of web sites which are not operated under the power of business money and you'll have better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell, because they're all paid by the same people to tell the same lies or 9/10 lies.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, What is free software? (2006)

Money , People , Truth , Lie

“Splendid, it has done me enormous good to finally see and read something in Switzerland that isn't bullshit. All of it is very nice, it is really something; your manifesto expresses every philosophy seeking truth, when there is no truth, only convention.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

In a letter to Tristan Tzara, Nov. 1919, (after having received a copy of 'Manifesto Dada 3.', written by Tzara); as quoted in: TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, Marius Hentea, MIT Press, 12 Sep 2014, p. 115
1910's

Truth , Reading

“"Thank God for the French army." When we read about Germany, when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race—when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon themselves. It seems to me that, at a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers… to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force remains whatever it is… such a proposal, it seems to me, is likely to be considered by the French Government at present, at any rate, as somewhat unseasonable.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1933/mar/23/european-situation#S5CV0276P0_19330323_HOC_299 in the House of Commons (23 March 1933) shortly after Hitler became Chancellor
The 1930s

God , War , World , Feeling

Quotes about read page 40

Quotes about read
page 40