Isaac Watts Quotes

When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.

Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing. Beatrice - Canto V 40-42

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

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

I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.

Be brief, that the mind may catch thy precepts, and the more easily retain them.

The reading of books, what is it but conversing with the wisest men of all ages and all countries.

A book is a souvenir of an idea.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

It is no learning to understand what you do not retain.

We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds.

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.