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Quotes of the Day for 23 September 2003 - Reading

William Holmes McGuffey was born at Finely Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania on this day in 1800. His family soon moved to a frontier community in Ohio, his only education was at home before he started teaching at age 13. He later did get his own education, and was a professor at Miami University in Ohio, where he wrote his famous McGuffey Peerless Pioneer Readers. He was president of Cincinnati College for three years before that institution went bankrupt, then was president at Ohio University for four years, then president of Woodward College at Cincinnati. He didn't like running schools, and may not have been a good administrator; he thrived as a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia for the last 28 years of his life. He was paid only a flat $1,000 for the first four Readers, which sold over 122 million copies during his life. He apparently didn't care about that, he cared that millions of kids learned to read.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
     - Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
     - Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709 - 1784

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
     - James Earl Jones

The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.
     - Margaret Barnes

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
     - S. I. Hayakawa

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace
  I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
  Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
     - Justin Richardson

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