Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
Saul BellowRead
I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep appreciation for the essential knowledge contained in 'The Periodic Table,' emphasizing its beauty and necessity.
In this quote, Saul Bellow expresses his profound admiration for 'The Periodic Table,' recognizing it as a work of essential knowledge that is both beautifully constructed and thoughtfully translated. Bellow's words convey a sense of gratitude for the valuable insights it offers, underscoring the importance of literature and knowledge in shaping our understanding of the world.
In practice
A teacher might use this quote to inspire students about the value of literature in their lives.
Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?
I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
What you have been taught by listening to others' words you will forget very quickly; what you have learned with your whole body you will remember for the rest of your life.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth.
Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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