". . . reason is the servant of the mind, unassailable by fortune, impregnable to calumny, uncorrupted by disease, unimpaired by old age." --Plutarch, The Education of Children.

"Distinguishing the sciences, one from another, according to the diversity of their objects [some] have come to believe that they ought to be studied separately, each science independently of all the others. In this they are indeed deceived. No one of the sciences is ever other than human discernment [humana sapienta] which remains always one and the same, however different be the things to which it is directed, being no more altered by them than is the light of the sun by the variety of things it illumines."--René Descarte.

"Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain . . . Amidst all this bustle, it is not reason which carries the prize but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in favorable colors. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and sword, but by the trumpeters, drummers and musicians of the army." David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

"If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whichever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you." --Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.

"Life is a chaos, a tangled and confused jungle in which man is lost. But his mind reacts against the sensation of bewilderment: he labors to find 'roads,' 'ways,' through the woods, in the form of clear, firm ideas concerning the universe, positive convictions concerning the nature of things. The ensemble, or system of these ideas, is culture in the true sense of the term; it is precisely the opposite of external ornament. Living is nothing more nor less than doing one thing instead of another. Hence the oldest book of India: Our acts follow our thoughts as the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox." Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University

"[T]he human mind is so constructed as to deal most easily with the constant, the fixed, the definite; it does its best to avoid the fluid, the unstable, and the changeable." --Charles de Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword.

"[of Ehrlich, Der juristiche Logik] the dictionary, like the nut picker, gives slow results. His general ideas are not novelties but his account of the development of the law on the continent is instructive and the book seems to me excellent with something of the German need to state everything. I remember how the Fliegende Blatter used to amuse me by the way it took you by the two ears and shoved your nose into a job. It didn't want any misunderstanding. How different from the French assumption that you twig the innuendo even of a silence." Holmes letter to Frankfurter Dec. 21, 1919,

"Of course I have no time for reading, but I have read one book that seems to me great, Herman Melville's Moby Dick--an account of sperm whaling with a story. I remember him dimly as a neighbor of ours at Pittsfield. A reader might think he got too much pork for a shilling but I would hardly give up a word of it . . ." Holmes to Frankfurter April 16, 1921.

Why is it sane to find meaning in a doodle and insane to find meaning in a puddle of rain? Why is it sane to count the incidence of the word 'murder' in Shakespeare and insane to count frost cracks in the sidewalk? Why is mathematics sane and numerology insane? Why is astronomy sane and astrology insane? . . . The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear. We commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning which we can discover and the given natural world does not . . . . Doodles, Shakespeare and Nepalese altars are human; we can interpret their human significance. Puddles, frost cracks, clouds and chemical components are not human and have no human significance." Annie Dillard, Living By Fiction

--Hughes Mearn

"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do [research] scientifically, they follow the forms you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything. Galilleo could say: 'I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to the astrologers?' Well they print their results in the newspapers, in the United States at least, in every daily paper every day. Why do we still have astrologers? . . . Now it might be true that if you go to the dentist on the day that Mars is at right angles to Venus, that it is better than if you go on a different day. It might be true that you can be cured by the miracle of Lourdes. But if it is true it ought to be investigated. Why? To improve it . . . . Now its also possible that the results of this investigation have other consequences, namely, that nothing is there. . . . In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas he's the controller and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult science, because they follow all the forms and precepts of scientific investigation, but they are missing something essential, because the planes don't land." Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

"Probably Gallileo himself would have gone farther in this direction if his imagination had not been hampered by the necessity of arguing with the Conservative Party. It is in general a mistake to waste time in discussion with people who have the wrong idea in their heads. But in Galileo's time and country the Conservative Party had thumbscrews at its service and could thereby enforce a certain amount of attention to its ideas." Alfred North Whitehead, A Philosopher Looks at Sciences

"Most birds are easily hypnotizable, everybody knows how easily it is done with chickens. In all dealings with animals, wild and tame, the soothing influence of the monotonous sound of slowly repeated words can easily be verified by every observer so much that it almost seems as if they understood the very meaning of what was said to them---what would I not give if I could understand what they said to me! . . . Of course all talk about an unwilling and unaware person being hypnotized at a distance is sheer nonsense. So is Psycho-Analysis." Axel Munthe, M.D., The Story of San Michele

"To one who locates psychiatry somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullibility, the cold-blooded desire to make money by giving one's fellows (at best) obvious advice and (at worst) notions even sillier than the ones which made them suffer smacks of Schadenfreude." Gore Vidal

"I now feel some anxiety that this story will seem to be losing itself like a path that has climbed a hill and then lost itself in an overgrowth of brambles. For I have told you all but one of the things that stand out very clearly. And yet I have not approached any sort of conclusion. There is, of course, a conclusion. However indefinite, there always is some point which serves that need of remembrances and stories." Tennessee Williams

". . . what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?" Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

"Almost anything worth learning, is set forth in Greek or Latin, [and of these two] almost all knowledge of things is to be sought in the Greek authors." --Erasmus, De Ratione Studii

"The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more ever year I live; it is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally keen enough, or too keen, about doing that, yet they will not do it in the simplest and best manner by reading." --Matthew Arnold, letter to his sister.

"What he read, he read he read well. Towards the end of his life he made it a rule to read half an hour of Greek before dinner." --Editors' Introduction to The Note-books of Matthew Arnold

[by the best kind of reading you] "gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves. . . . reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor its it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing. . .When we speak of somebody as 'well-read,' we should have this ideal of achievement in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, 'If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.'"" --Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read A Book

"Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, an accumulation of knowledge, or what is sometimes meant by the term 'a well-stocked mind.' It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by any one, or by any small number. [But as to 'improving reading,'] I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. . . [Reading] affects our moral and religious existence [and] even the effect of the better writers, in an age like ours, may be degrading to some readers; for we must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do." T.S. Eliot

"When Man has arrrived at a certain ripeness of intellect, any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting point towards all the 'two-and-thirty places.'" --Keats.

"Things have meaning only as they associate themselves with other things, and they take on added meanings as those associations multiply. It is only when one's mind is already a storehouse of impressions that it will possess the focal points on which fresh impressions will converge. A page from a travel-book will not set up relations with a poem, or a phrase in a medical treatise leap across centuries to illuminate The Anatomy of Melancholy, or a volume taken down by chance suggest questions to which we may turn in our so-called leisure hours for months, unless we first know our poet, and our Burton, and unless we have the trick of ranging far afield. It was because Newton's apple fell into a reservoir already stored with the observations and ponderings of years that human thought about the laws of the universe was revolutionized." John Livingston Lowes, "Teaching and the Spirit of Research" (1933) published in The American Scholar

"Then thinking of the day of judgement I read a book of Tacitus: Histories-there is a man who can write-every sentence as potent as vitriol. He is one of the exceptions to the rule I have the courage to lay down: The literature of the past is a bore. The exceptions are:
1) when you are studying it and the interest is not in it but in your thoughts about it.
2) when you are humbugged-as in G. Murray's Euripides-and your pleasure comes from what is not in Euripidies
3) when by exceptional study you have adapted yourself to an alien environment.
. . . When I take Homer I don't enjoy him by the slice but only with a nutpicker laboriously gutting slender pages. Having freed my heart by blasphemy, I send you my blessings and shut up." Holmes to Frankfurter, March 29, 1924

"Textual criticism, like most other sciences, is an aristocratic affair, not communicable to all men, nor to most men. . . .to be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think . . . Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding in your head." A. E. Housman

"American scholarship is now a sort of huge make-work program for the conventionally educated. In a case like [Mark Twain's Letters], scholar-squirrels gather up every scrap of writing they can find and stuff these bits into volume after volume, with metastasizing footnotes. The arrangements that Mr. & Mrs. Clemens made to have their laundry and dry-cleaning done by mail (no, I won't explain how it worked) is a joy for those who revel in dry-cleaning, but what of the unkempt many who sit in darkness? No matter. We are dealing here with ruthless collectors. To them one "fact" is equal to any other." Gore Vidal, Twain's Letters

"Madame Bovary is one of a series of novels including Don Quijote and Northanger Abbeythat illustrate the evil effects of reading." Mary McCarthy

"Part of being a cultivated person is knowing what to forget. Gertrude Stein recorded the happy moment when she realized she couldn't read all the books in the world. The trully cultivated person realizes that he probably hasn't a chance to read even all the good books in the world." Aristides [pseudonym of Jospeh Epstein], An Extremely Well-Informed SOB.

[Pococurante the Venetian nobleman speaking of his great library of unread books:] "Fools admire everything in a celebrated author. I only read to please myself, and I only like what suits me.. . . [W]hen I saw that [philosphers] doubted everything, I concluded that I knew as much as [they] did and did not need anybody else in order to be ignorant.'--- 'Oh! What a superior man!' said Candide under his breath. 'What a great genius this Procurante is! Nothing can please him!' Voltaire, Candide  

[Bernard Berenson's library at Villa I Tatti, Wharton called a book worm's heaven]: "the fulfillment of all he has dreamed that a great working library ought to be, continually weeded out and renewed, 'not made of spent deeds but of doing', not a dusty mausoleum of dead authors but a glorious assemblage of eternally living ones." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward 27.

"Modern writing is mushroom writing; modern books are written for the day, and perish with it; and even while the day lasts how readily they drop from one's hands! The thought of purchasing such a book and keeping it to look at again occurs to no one, and who would dream of reading the best-seller of last year?" Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years.

"The bee flies everywhere and carries home what she can use; and a studious man extracts from his reading what will make him better. Erasmus, Parallels