“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed how much Warren reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“If you cannot read them [books], at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.”
— Helen Keller Primary source“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are: 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my bookfriends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their large loves and heavenly charities.”
— Helen Keller Primary sourceBooks Knowledge Experience Education Learning