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.

A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.