All genuine learning is active, not passive.
One of the aims of sexual union is procreation – the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.
Education is the sum total of one’s experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.
If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.
You must be able to say “I understand,” before you can say “I agree,” or “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.
Finally, do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading.
We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only once, since it is almost wholly a written language.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it – which comes to the same thing – is by writing in it.
Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. The language they must use to communicate is an imperfect medium, clouded by emotion and colored by interest, as well as inadequately transparent for thought.
You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.
To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
When we speak of someone as “well-read,” we should have this ideal 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.
You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.
What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.
Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.
We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few.
Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.