A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.
Interpretation
Books patiently await their readers, offering knowledge and change at no cost.
This quote highlights the timelessness and enduring nature of books as a medium of knowledge and personal transformation. It emphasizes that regardless of the passage of time, a well-crafted book remains accessible and ready to impart wisdom to those who seek it, illustrating the profound relationship between a reader and a book that can lead to significant personal and societal change.
In practice
This quote is perfect for inspiring young students to develop a love for reading.
Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.
All that being a college coach has done, is it's reaffirmed the need to take care of our young people. They're the ones that are going to make a difference. We spend a lot of time blaming them for stuff, and not enough time mentoring them and helping them stand on their own two feet.
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.
No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power.
The child, making use of all that he finds around him, shapes himself for the future.
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