Common Reading Experience

Famous quotes containing the words reading experience, common, reading and/or experience:

    For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
    Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)

    I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
    Joseph Addison (1672–1719)

    The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)