Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Reading,
Language, Symbolism
- "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for
yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life."
-
-
W. Somerset Maugham
- Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the
message."
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
"... the Decalogue, the Second Commandment ... 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any
graven image...' I wondered ... why the God of these people would have included
instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience.
It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author
assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We
may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract,
universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or
making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The
God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception
requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography
thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.
People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from
word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on the Mosaic injunction ... [The]
media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of
the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations."
- Grouch Marx: "Outside
of a dog, a book is Man’s best friend. And inside of a dog, it’s too dark to
read."
- Maxims of Ptahhotep, 3400 B.C.: "Be a
craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and
speech is mightier than all fighting."
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626): "Some books are
to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested... Read
not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and
discourse; but to weigh and consider."
- Barrow: "He that loves a book will never
want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual
comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly
entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes."
- Ray Bradbury: "You don't have to burn books
to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
- Robertson Davies: "There are great numbers
of people to whom the act of reading a book -- any sort of book -- is wondrous; they speak
of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to
pregnant women, or the newly dead."
- S. I. Hayakawa: "In a very real sense,
people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not
read."
- John Kieran: "I am a part of everything that
I have read."
- Louis L'amour (1908-1988): "For one who
reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography
and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all
periods of time."
- Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864): "What is
reading, but silent conversation."
- Lord Edward Lytton (1803-1873): "In science,
read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are
always modern."
- Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923): "The
pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same
books."
- Richard McKenna: "Any book that helps a
child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is
good for him."
- John Russell (b.1919): "I cannot think
of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed, without warning or discomfort, on the
last page of the new book that we most wanted to read."
- B. F. Skinner (1904-1990): "We shouldn't
teach great books; we should teach a love of reading."
- Socrates (469-399 BC): "Employ your time in
improving yourself by other men's writing so that you shall come easily by what others
have labored hard for."
- Henry David Thoreau: "Read the best books
first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
- Atwood H. Townsend: "No matter how busy you
may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen
ignorance."
- Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723): "Choose an
author as you choose a friend."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: "If we encounter a man
of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
- E.M. Forster: "At night, when the curtains
are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity."
- Ezra Pound: "No man understands a deep book
until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
- Marcel Proust: "There are perhaps no days of
our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."
- John Ruskin: "A book worth reading is worth
buying."
- Sydney Smith: "No furniture is so charming
as books."
- Oscar Wilde: "The difference between
journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not
read."
- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.: "Never make fun of
someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language."
- Thomas Jefferson: "The man who reads nothing
at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
- Winston Churchill, quoted by William Manchester, The Last
Lion: "The man who cannot say what he has to say in good English
cannot have very much to say that is worth listening to."
- Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 30, 1859, address before the Wisconsin State
Agricultural Society: "A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access
to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to
the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for
successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones."
- Richard de Bury: "A library of wisdom is more precious
than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever
therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become
a lover of books."
- Paul
Johnson, A New Deuteronomy: "When we
are dealing with concepts like freedom and equality, it is essential to use words
accurately and in good faith... beware of those who seek to win an argument at the
expense of the language. For the fact that they do is proof positive that their
argument is false, and proof presumptive that they know it is. A man who deliberately
inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings
if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and
those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social
ones."
- Emerson: "The corruption of man is followed
by the corruption of language."
- Frantz Fanon: "The business of obscuring
language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder."
- Joseph Joubert: "Abuse of words [is] the
foundation of ideology."
- Jonathan Miller, MD, The Body In Question:
Miller explains the power of metaphor as an aid to thinking and problem-solving: "...
medicine did not make an effective contribution to human welfare until the middle of the
twentieth century. The great leap forward is often attributed to a rapid increase in
heroic procedures and the discovery of new drugs, but what distinguishes the medicine of
the past twenty-five years is not that its practitioners are equipped with an arsenal of
antibiotics and antiseptics, but that they are furnished with a comprehensive and
unprecedented understanding of what the healthy body is and how it survives and
protects itself. We have today an impressive mastery of our illnesses precisely because we
have a systematic insight into the processes which constitute health. This has been
achieved by the accurate identification of the sort of thing our body is. And
since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it
is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been
made by the application of suggestive metaphors...
In their efforts to manage and master the physical world, human beings have shown a
remarkable capacity for inventing devices which lift, dig, hoist, wind, pump, press,
filter and extract... The practical benefits of such ingenuity have been so impressive
that it is easy to forget how much we have learned from the image of such mechanisms.
While they have helped us to master the world, they have been just as helpful in giving us
a way of thinking about it and about ourselves. It is
impossible to imagine how anyone could have made sense of the heart before we knew what a
pump was. Before the invention of automatic gun-turrets, there was no model to
explain the finesse of voluntary muscular movement. The immediate experience of the human
body is something which we take for granted. We perceive and act with it and become fully
aware of its presence only when it is injured, or when it goes wrong. Even then, the
subjective experience of the body is usually incoherent and perplexing, and when we want
it put right, we refer to people who have learnt to think about it with the help of
technical metaphors: experts whose use of analogy has enabled them to visualise the body
not merely as an intelligible system, but as an organised system of systems - which does
not mean that man is an engine or that his humanity is a delusion." [Editor's
note: Miller answers the question of every immature student: "Why should
I study that since I never plan to work in that area or to use it?"
The answer is that no matter what area in which one chooses to live and work, he or she
will be able to solve problems there, largely, to the extent that one is able to employ a
cross-fertilization of ideas by the use of metaphor.]
- Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "Life
... [cannot] be expressed in terms of something else [i.e. as a metaphor]. This is true of
all fundamental forms of being."
- Harvard student brochure: "A student can
arrive at college with no finer attribute than a mind well-stocked from reading."
- John Locke: "Reading furnishes the mind only
with materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
- C.S. Lewis: "We read to be reminded that we
are not alone."
- Winston Churchill: making light of the need to
follow absolutely the rules of grammar, focusing on dangling prepositions: "That is
something up with which I will not put."
- Simon & Garfunkle, I Am A Rock:
"I have my books and my poetry to protect me..."
- Thomas Carlyle: "If we think about it, all that a
university or final highest school can do for us, is still but what the first school began
doing -- teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we
learn the alphabet and letters of all manners of books. But the place where we are to get
knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read,
after all manners of prefessors have done their best for us. The
true university of these days is a collection of books."
- Og Mandino: "History is filled with stories of individuals
who dated a new era in their lives from the reading of a single book."
- Barbara Tuchman: "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without
books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a
standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses
erected in a sea of time."
- "A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to
whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the
already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for
successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones."
-
Abraham Lincoln
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