My basic advice to students is to begin building their own libraries—how the computer will affect this library building, I am not certain. Still, anyone with a taste for wonder—not all, apparently, have it—should learn to haunt used book stores, even more than stores that sell new books.
-
-
Erasmus on What it Means to be a Philosopher
I do not mean by philosopher, one who is learned in the ways of dialectic or physics, but one who casts aside the false pseudo-realities and with open mind seeks and follows the truth.
-
Hart on Living Things
All living things are boundlessly suggestive, if only you are willing to heed them.
-
Lewis on “Age Specific” Books
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty — except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
-
Dante on The Exile’s Longing
If it should happen. . . If this sacred poem— this work so shared by heaven and by earth that it has made me lean through these long years— can ever overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair fold where I slept, a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it, by then with other voice, with other fleece, I shall return as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown.