Vikram Seth Quotes

I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren't bad things on which to ponder a few notions.

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

We're supposed to be uncomfortable when we read something. That's how we learn.

I'm a voracious reader. What that does is keep your mind fresh and active and hearing different voices and different styles. TV can be derivative, and if you just watch TV, you're not widening the circle.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.

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

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

My father always said, 'Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf' - so I make sure I read.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I try not to be overly analytical.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

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

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.