Reading for Success

"Books," says E. P. Whipple, "are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."

"As a rule," said Benjamin Disraeli, "the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."
"You get into society, in the widest sense," says Geikie, "in a great library, with the huge advantage of needing no introductions, and not dreading repulses. From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in the silent levees of the immortals there is no pride, but the highest is at the service of the lowest, with a grand  humility.

You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority; for books are perfectly well-bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any discriminations." Sir William Waller observed, "In my study, I am sure to converse with none but wise men, but abroad it is impossible for me to avoid the society of fools." "It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge," says Webster, "that what it gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its ends become means, all its attainments help to new conquests."

"At this hour, five hundred years since their creation," says De Quincey, "the tales of Chaucer, never equaled on this earth for their tenderness and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the modernization of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth. At this hour, one thousand nine hundred years since their creation, the pagan tales of Ovid, never equaled on this earth for the gayety of their movement and the capricious graces of their narrative, are read by all Christendom."

"Hundreds of books read once," says Robertson, "have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down,  not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit."

"This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you," says Trollope, "is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasures that God has prepared for His creatures. Other pleasures may be more ecstatic; but the habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know, in which there is no alloy.

Ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. —Shakespeare.