The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.

— Allan Bloom (h/t: Cultural Offering)

#culture #life #quotes #reading

What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.

The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.

— Harold Bloom, from How to Read and Why

#reading #quotes

(h/t: The Hammock Papers)

Never lend a book to a man as you will have to set a stick of dynamite under him before you get it back.

Flannery O’Connor, “Letter to Betty Hester” dated 12th November 1956

#quotes #reading #OConnor

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

— Ray Bradbury

#quotes #reading #culture

index

Here is a running list of all the tags used at “Taking Thoughts Captive.” Clicking on any of them will take you to a page with all the posts having that particular tag, just like an index.

#culture #devotional #Evangelicalism #festivals #history #hymnody #Lent #Lewis #Luther #Lutheran #life #links #miscellanies #OConnor #philosophy #politics #prayers #psalms #quotes #reading #Reformed #sacraments #TFCC #theology #worship