A Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Quote Topics

Art Books Creations Greatest Having Human Human Mind Mind Read Reviewing Them Without

Quote Author

Georg C. Lichtenberg
German - Scientist
July 1, 1742 - February 24, 1799

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here’s every word I spoke for a week. Here’s a year’s worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

Kenneth Goldsmith

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

Horace Mann

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.

John Dingell

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

Benjamin Disraeli

And tell them all about the books you've read. Better still, buy some more books and read them. That's an order. You can never read too many books.

P.B. Kerr

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Peter M. Brant

Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." Translation by Sharon Lebell

Epictetus

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

John Updike

I read comic books when I was a kid. Now I have a passion for art and galleries that I think came from that. I didn't read a book without pictures until I was 21.

Frank Skinner

Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

Edward Hirsch

The cause of misery, death, and all personal and collective problems is rooted in the mind, the false, copy mind. The real, divine mind is transcendental, the witness, without thinking. Divine mind is without thoughts, all knowing, and eternally blissful. Trying to solve problems by thinking about them never produces a permanent solution because this false mind creates all problems; whereas, divine mind and our inner guidance bring forth solutions for our greatest good and the greatest good for all.

Terry Cole-Whittaker

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

Ancient art has a specific inner content. At one time, art possessed the same purpose that books do in our day, namely: to preserve and transmit knowledge. In olden days, people did not write books, they incorporated their knowledge into works of art. We would find a great many ideas in the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read them.

G. I. Gurdjieff

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and re-read them...digest them...a student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by 20 books he has merely skimmed.