top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reading quotes
"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."
"Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process."
"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
Explore more quotes by Irving Babbitt
"Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards."
"A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism."
"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."
"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."
"To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy."
"We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective."
"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."
"A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice."
bottom of page