I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.
Abraham LincolnRead
All I have learned, I learned from books.
Interpretation
Knowledge and wisdom can primarily be acquired through reading and studying.
This quote by Abraham Lincoln emphasizes the importance of books as a source of knowledge and personal growth. It suggests that books play a crucial role in shaping one's understanding of the world and developing intellectual capacities, stressing that the knowledge we gain from reading is foundational to our learning process.
In practice
During a graduation speech to encourage students to value their reading habits.
I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.
Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
For it has been said, all that a man hath will he give for his life; and while all contribute of their substance the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country's cause. The highest merit, then is due to the soldier.
And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.
When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
Sadly, there are many children who have not yet been given the chance to 'discover the magic of reading, or set foot in the worlds you can discover on bookshelves.
Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.
Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.
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