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Quote by Alan Jacobs

“Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”

Quote by Alan Jacobs

Work

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

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Author

Alan Jacobs

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“أبسط مثال على أن الجودة لا علاقة لها بالشهرة، أن العالم يتفاجأ بعشرات المؤلفين والعلماء والأدباء غير المعروفين كل عام من خلال الجوائز العالمية مثل جائزة نوبل أو حتى جائزة البوكر، وإلى الآن العشرات من الحاصلين على نوبل ليسوا مشاهير لدى طوائف كثيرة في الوسط الثقافي نفسه.”

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”