From Reading in Bed ed. by Steven Gilbar
“Books” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“College education is the reading of certain books which the common-sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated.”
“As whole nations have derived their culture form a single book- as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large parts of Europe…. [P]erhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost- say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon…”
“Reading at Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
“I believe that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature…”
“Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics. …to keep up and add to his English …. is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for this purpose.”
Ouch. And I appear to have lost all my other Thoreau quotes. I don’t know that I want to go back and redo them, so these may be all you see.
Turns out, I had my Thoreau quotes. But I didn’t become aware of that until I had gone back over his essay and recopied the ones I liked the best. Then, as I was going through and changing things to italics so that my comments were clearly differentiated from quotes, I found that my “Emerson” entry was really a Thoreau entry, but with the wrong title. DANG IT.
I’ll probably go fix it, since I went to fix Thoreau. Surely Emerson deserves equal time?
Great post