You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments – the elements of thought – until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.

We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies.

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God’s love and the love of God.

If your friend wishes to read your ‘Plutarch’s Lives,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘The Federalist Papers,’ tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat – but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.

The question, is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of “truth” – mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historial and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves.

One of the aims of sexual union is procreation – the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.

One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While.