Charles Spurgeon Quotes

I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.

It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

A thing worth learning is worth learning well.

I'm not a master. I'm a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I'm still learning. So I'm a student-master. I don't believe in the word 'master.' I consider the master as such when they close the casket.

It's only those who are persistent and willing to study things deeply, who achieve the master work.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

A true master gives all his knowledge. But only when the student is ready.

The student learns rules but all the rules in the world never make a picture.

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

For being book smart, I thought he (A. Barlett Giamatti) had a lot of street smarts, which is tough to find sometimes.

I read when I get up in the morning, when I can during the day and every single evening. Most of my weekends are spent reading great books. Books are my constant companions. If you eat three times a day you'll be fed. But if you read three times a day you'll be wise.

Reading means borrowing.

I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.

Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

Even books are nurses, medicines are nurses. But we must work to bring about the time when man shall recognise his mastery over his own body. Herbs and medicines have power over us as long as we allow them; when we become strong, these external methods are no more necessary.

Education that consists in learning things and not the meaning of them is feeding upon the husks and not the corn

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.