Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

People say Wu-Tang makes you think too much. What's wrong with thinking?

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

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

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

A lot of stuff people do these days is not mentally challenging.

I think it's good to stimulate your mind.

If you're not challenged, you'll get bored.

Read books and keep informed. The conversation can get old if you don't have some good new topics to bring to the table.

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business which tasks the most faculties of his mind.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind.

Video games just can't compare with the variety and intensity of reading.

The mind requires regular use to remain strong.

In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.