On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books
Karen Swallow Prior
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.”
“To read well is not to scour books for lessons on what to think. Rather, to read well is to be formed in how to think.”
“Indeed, there is something in the very form of reading—the shape of the action itself—that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.”
“Despair has encouraged some to place more faith in political leaders than in biblical principles. In turn, some Christians, disillusioned over what other believers have said or done, have chosen to disavow their family of faith, giving in to despair. To despair over politics—regardless of which side of the political divide one lands on—as many Christians have done in the current apocalyptic political climate, is to forget that we are but wayfarers in this land. Choosing hope—whether amid the annihilation of the world or merely a political breakdown—is virtuous.”
“A book that requires nothing from you might offer the same diversion as that of a television sitcom, but it is unlikely to provide intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual rewards long after the cover is closed.”
“I retell in the pages of Booked how, by reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience.”
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”; we are what we repeatedly do.”
“What does it mean to practice faith well? While our works cannot save us, our habits can strengthen our faith.”
“Our actions, our decisions, and even the very perceptions we register in our consciousness have been primed by the larger story—of our family, our community, our culture—in which we imagine ourselves.”
“The marital relationship is singular in the way each partner shapes and forms the other. The good habits practiced by one partner contribute to the positive formation of the other. The same is true of bad habits. This mutuality doubles the effects of one person’s habits, whether positively or negatively.”
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Book Keywords:
virtue, faith
