Quotes About Engagement

It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it.

Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them?

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.

if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate;

because letter-writing requires more of me than just the basic wherewithal:

daß man nicht das Recht hatte, ein Buch aufzuschlagen, wenn man sich nicht verpflichtete, alle zu lesen

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

The student is to read history actively not passively.

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk to much.

a good reader makes a good book

There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart; his memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs; his belief, that he shall not admit any opposing considerations.

curiosity and command attention, attracting us first by their beauty.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.