“Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In one hear during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with your your life long?”
“A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.”
“Somewhere along the line I had fallen in love with learning, and it became a lifelong romance. Early on I discovered it was fun to follow along the byways of history to find those treasures that await any searcher. It may be that all later decisions followed naturally from that first one.”
“Education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, for increased appreciation of all one sees or experiences. It should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness.”
Sir Richard Francis Burton: “Do what thy manhood bids thee do, / From none but self expect applause; / He noblest lives and noblest dies / Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
“It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”
“I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.”
“I believe adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble. What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.”
“Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will.”
“Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that had happened is leading to now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archaeologists of the future. … Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading.”
“It is not enough to have learned, for living is sharing and I must offer what I have for whatever it is worth.”
“One does not forget the dark, lonely nights, or the odd little memories that linger for no specific reason.”
“Upon the shelves of our libraries, the world’s greatest teachers await our questions.”
“We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.”