“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.”

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

Teachers must learn how to teach they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.

Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.

Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

Society already possesses the psychological techniques needed to obtain universal observance of a code – a code which would guarantee the success of a community or state. The difficulty is that these techniques are in the hands of the wrong people-or, rather, there aren’t any right people.

The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Men build society and society builds men.

Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.

Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.

I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning. Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it’s always nice to know where you’re going is my theory.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

I am Envy, I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.