Education Literature Reading Quotes & Sayings

People don't change their behavior unless it makes a difference for them to do so. — Sharon Stone

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity. — Xinran

It's a most peculiar psychology - this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Science is based on faith too!' in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on 'faith', then science is of the same kind as religion - directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, 'The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests' faith can't do the same.' Are you sure you wish to go there, oh faithist? Perhaps, on further reflection, you would prefer to retract this whole business of 'Science is a religion too! — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Reading will help you to discover your sacred-self — Lailah Gifty Akita

Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies. — Greg Mortenson

Most of what I call "cooking" is just melting cheese on stuff. — Darynda Jones

Ancient literature is a rich history. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It is the spirit of the poets that gives the soldiers strength to fight. — Casting Crowns

After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents. — Ronnie Musgrove

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! — Philip Pullman

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. — Leo Tolstoy

I believe people exist to be enjoyed. — Alice Walker

Read good books to improve your life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say. — Leo Tolstoy

We travel to ancient times by reading history books. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Literature gives great light and great life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises. — John Lydon

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous. — David Nicholls

I like to know what the gestation of the idea is, I like to know the foundation, and I do a lot of reading and research. — Kieran Bew

The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. "The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled," Hazlitt wrote, "and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left." Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: "My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!" (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you're asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased. — Anne Fadiman

It's your life. You're the one that has to live it. If you make the wrong choices at least you know they were yours. — Ingrid Diaz

Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

ISIS is winning the propaganda war. They are recruiting people, including Americans, to join them, with the promise that they are joining this great apocalyptic movement that is going to defeat the West. — Marco Rubio

My life transformed by making myself a reader. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The Bible is the greatest literature of all times. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Happiness, love and compassion are the aroma of your soul. — Banani Ray

The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments of Britain and America. New life was breathed into psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, while structuralism gave way to post-structuralism. The stability of the text as a focus of study was challenged by deconstruction, a theory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which represented a complete fracture with the old liberal-formalist mode of reading. Coherence and unity were seen as illusory and readers were liberated to aim at their own meanings. Hardy's texts were at the centre of these theoretical movements, including one that came to prominence in the 1980s, feminism. — Geoffrey Harvey

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. — George Bernard Shaw

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
— Iris Murdoch