Friedrich Engels Quotes

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are.

Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

There's nothing like history. I don't make mistakes today that I made many years ago, because I've already made them.

I love history, and I thought I knew history well, but I was shocked by how little I knew about it.

When you're educated, it allows you to be more worldly. It's more than just what happens in a classroom.

I think by embracing your heritage and your history, it just serves you so much more, and you become a deeper and more powerful person by embracing them.

I was kind of reading you know Judy Blume and stuff like that. But yeah, but I've since educated myself.

Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

If a man brings a good mind to what he reads he may become, as it were, the spiritual descendant to some extent of great men, and this link, this spiritual hereditary tie, may help to just kick the beam in the right direction at a vital crisis; or may keep him from drifting through the long slack times when, so to speak, we are only fielding and no balls are coming our way.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.