Mental Enrichment Quotes

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Man cannot live by bread alone. Man after all is composed of intellect and soul.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Let no young man delay the study of philosophy, and let no old man become weary of it; for it is never too early nor too late to care for the well-being of the soul.

When you feel this knowledge and this spark in yourself, you've gotta continue feeding it. The best thing is to spend time around other wise men, that keeps it burning. That keeps it in every degree sharp as steel, but make sure you absorb enough to find out how it sparks from yourself, how the self starts the self. Once you've got that you should be free. That's freedom, to me.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.

I like learning new stuff, and continuing to educate myself as best I can.

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.

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me.

The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food supplied for the soul of man.

We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.