Cicero on reading

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.

Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain1835–1910Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in “Disappearance of Literature”, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Writing