Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Be quick to learn and wise to know.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

A man hears only what he understands.

Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

Just because someone says something, whether it's at the podium during the briefing or the president tweets, I can't always assume that's factual. That's insane. We have to be very quick on our toes in fact checking.

I like to read and understand.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

I think literacy is everything.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

People really need to take time and read a book. You know? That’s my advice. You could read A New Slant on Life, you could read Dianetics. And I think if you really read it, you’ll understand it, but unless you do, you’ll speculate. And I think that’s a mistake to do that.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

Text without context is pretext.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

The information was correct but the interpretations were not.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly learned, but may be little knowing.