The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly or at medium speed. I either do, or I don’t.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

Only the educated are free.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you’re trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you’re giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you’re trying to do?

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

When we believe the best of people, we let go of each thing they do that is hurtful to us. And we choose to think things like, ‚I don’t believe they meant to hurt me.‘ ‚Maybe they’re having a bad day or don’t feel well.‘ ‚They probably don’t even realize how they sound.‘

Experience teaches only the teachable.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Yes, it is one of my ultimate aims – it is the ultimate sense of football: to make the people happy, to let them live some emotions that you usually can’t get.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

My faith helps me overcome such negative emotions and find my equilibrium.