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“So much patient perseverance could not but eventually succeed”
Smiles describes Stephenson’s progress in arithmetic as the cumulative result of study and patient persistence rather than easy aptitude.
Source note: The Life of George Stephenson and of his Son Robert Stephenson, Chapter IV, “The Stephensons at Killingworth—Education and Self-Education of Father and Son”; represented 1868 revised edition, Project Gutenberg #46229. The excerpt is Smiles’s narration of Stephenson’s patient arithmetic study under John Wigham.
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“It is reflection which forms habits, and fixes principles indelibly on the heart.”
Habit formation becomes stronger when action is joined with reflection, because principles understood and revisited are more likely to guide later choices.
Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Wollstonecraft connects reflection with the formation of durable principles and habits.
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“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
Regular reading is compared with physical exercise because repeated intellectual use can strengthen attention, knowledge, and mental capacity over time.
Source note: The Tatler No. 147; the comparison presents reading as a form of regular exercise for the mind.
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“it is only when he has turned it over that he can be said to know it.”
Learning becomes knowledge, in this account, when material has been actively reconsidered and integrated rather than merely encountered or memorized.
Source note: The Art of Literature, section “On Thinking for Oneself,” T. Bailey Saunders translation; Project Gutenberg #10714. The preceding sentence says a person must first learn something before turning it over in the mind.
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“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
Thoreau treats reading as potentially transformative: a book can mark a genuine before-and-after point when it gives language to questions a reader has struggled to express.
Source note: Walden, chapter “Reading,” in the discussion of books that can reveal new possibilities and answer enduring questions.
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“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Bacon distinguishes what reading, conversation, and writing each contribute to intellectual development.
Source note: Of Studies; Bacon distinguishes the intellectual uses of reading, conversation, and writing within the essay’s compact account of study and judgment.