Edward Gibbon Quotes

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

I think it's so important to feed your brain you know. Sometimes you've just got to read.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read as it was intended - for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your - what's the word I'm looking for? - your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that's powerful.

Many of you have been reared on the cliche that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.

I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn't read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it'll work as well as reading print worked for me.

I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.

The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.