How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Quotes

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....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that resu...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to ou...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we to...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The ...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

... a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solve...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn ...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

In short, we can only learn from our "betters".

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

... always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this attitude. You will be surprised to find out how much t...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is diffe...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word “orthodox,” which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning “right opinion.” These are books for which there is one and only one rig...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of...

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading