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"An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen."
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"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."
"We encounter great souls by reading great books."
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
"Reading opens up other pockets of the mind."
"Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."
Explore more quotes by Irving Babbitt
"If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism."
"For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual."
"The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people."
"A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog."
"Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type."
"We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration."
"According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication."
"Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment."
"The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism."
"Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful."
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