Quotes from Jean Leclercq

Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.

In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced. hearing what is called the "voices of the pages." It is a real acoustical reading.

For the ancients, to meditate is to read a text and to learn it "by heart" in the fullest sense of this expression, that is, with one's whole being: with the body, since the mouth pronounced it, with the memory which fixes it, with the intelligence which understands its meaning, and with the will which desires to put it into practice.

But if the great ideas of the past are to remain young and vital, each generation must, in turn, think them through and rediscover them in their pristine newness.