Quotes from Alan Jacobs

When we look to the past ... what we are always looking for is whatever is better than we are ... The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine it.

To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.

for heaven's sake, don't turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the "calories burned" readout

the tale of a community that provides security in exchange for thought

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that childhood reading experts continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language.

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.

But, all things considered, I believe that most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read. But why do they want to have read? Because, I think, they conceive of reading simply as a means of uploading information to their brains.

one of the greatest dangers for a Chrisitian is to assume that any point in our lives that our journey is over and that we have all the answers.

asked, 'Lord, does he or she who sees the vision perceive it through soul or spirit?' He answered, 'One perceives through neither soul nor spirit but by mind, which mediates between both; visions are mental.

We must learn to think of our lives as stories that move along recognizable paths, paths followed by our predecessors and indeed indeed

Over the past hundred and fifty years , it has become increasingly difficult to extricate reading from academic expectations; but I believe such extrication is necessary. Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about --I scruple not to say it -- skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of "the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved

He who understands all but lacks Self Knowledge lacks all.

My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don't get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6

Yes, I know that the word "school" derives from scholia, meaning leisure.

When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel in it. Therefore no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.

The lawless are the ones to scorch, rather than the just. The lawless work alone; the righteous work amongst their flock. Do the will of our Father; we all come from Him! Our Father is sublime; His will is beneficent. He has watched over you so you may find peace.

He who earnestly and persistently seeks, shall find! To him who knocks hard, the door will be opened.

But for people like Erasmus (with his "cry of thankful joy" on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Can I get back to my books now?"), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have turned out differently.

Lewis was an exceptionally skillful exposer of ideological forces and their titanic influence over us, but he rarely gets credit for this from contemporary intellectuals because it is their most treasured beliefs that, more often than not, he is exposing. So instead of praising him for the acuity of his insights, they call him "reactionary" or "Victorian