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"The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write."
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"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."

"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."

"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."
Explore more quotes by Roger Ascham

"Let the master praise him, and say, "Here ye do well." For, I assure you, there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning, as is praise."

"He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him."

"Mark all mathematical heads which be wholly and only bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, how unapt to serve the world."

"In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry."

"There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise."

"In mine opinion, love is fitter than fear, gentleness better than beating, to bring up a child rightly in learning."
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