Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man’s lifetime income – which he then spends sending his son to college.
Middle age is when you realize that you’ll never live long enough to try all the recipes you spent thirty years clipping out of newspapers and magazines.
They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate. depend upon books.
The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.
If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.
What’s wonderful is to read the different translations – some done in 1600 and some in 1900 – of the same passage. It’s fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.
Most people – and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all – are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.
I believe the world is increasingly in danger of becoming split into groups which cannot communicate with each other, which no longer think of each other as members of the same species.
How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.
