We expect a great man to be a good reader.
Interpretation
Great individuals are often well-read and knowledgeable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that to achieve greatness, one should cultivate a habit of reading. This reflects the idea that reading broadens the mind, provides wisdom, and nurtures the qualities that lead to personal and professional success.
In practice
In a speech about personal development, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, we expect a great man to be a good reader, emphasizing the importance of education.'
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.
Children want to mimic adults. They notice when you choose to prepare fresh vegetables over calling in another pizza pie for dinner. They will see that food made with love and care outweighs going through the drive-through window.
Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - Iβve read so often that Iβve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.
In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity - it is a prerequisite.
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