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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.
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“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Partial knowledge can produce misplaced confidence; the warning favors deeper study over shallow certainty.
Source note: An Essay on Criticism, Part II; Pope warns that shallow learning can produce premature confidence before deeper study tempers judgment.
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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 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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“Reading is the most rational employment, if people seek food for the understanding.”
Reading is valuable when it feeds judgment and understanding rather than becoming a performance of remembering words without examining their ideas.
Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, section on Reading; Wollstonecraft distinguishes thoughtful reading from superficial verbal display.
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“all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects”
Pater describes intellectual progress as learning to distinguish parts within what initially seems confused, a method that makes clearer categories and more exact judgment possible.
Source note: Appreciations, essay “Style”; Project Gutenberg #4037. The immediate example concerns distinctions between prose, verse and poetry.