Ben Sasse Quotes

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

If you can't read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

I believe that if you can discover something of the truth of a person, then you will start to understand, and to understand is to move towards, if not like, then at least an empathy of some kind.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

It's only through listening that you learn, and I never want to stop learning.

The key to education is the experience of beauty.

When I was younger, I looked at getting older as this process of getting less interested in things and becoming colder, and of finding less joy in the mystery of things. And I've found the exact opposite to be true. I find that I'm getting warmer, and that I'm more mystified by human interactions.

When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.

True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Read in order to live.

Ignorance is my least favorite thing. I really think it's at the core of all our problems.

To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that's why we should never feel contempt for them.