What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
Interpretation
Loving books allows us to connect with past thinkers and escape reality.
This quote reflects the profound joy and privilege that comes from a deep love of literature. It suggests that books serve as a bridge to converse with great minds of the past and to explore fantastical worlds, enriching our lives in ways that are both enlightening and escapist.
In practice
In a book club meeting to express why you enjoy reading.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.
There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
A mother is a school. Empower her; and you empower a great nation.
What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils.
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