Charles van Doren > Quotes

“Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“you have to understand in order to disagree.”
― Charles van Doren

“Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“...they are able to forgive themselves, as a wise man once said, for being human. That is knowing that life is hard and virtue rare, they keep the ancient faith that it is better to love than to hate, to live fully even if imperfectly.”
― Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future

“But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However,”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“He recognized that, first, the rich are always desirous of governing for their own benefit, and second that the people can always turn against them and become a mob, taking things into its own hands. As always, the mean between extremes is to be sought.”
― Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works

“we can learn only from our “betters.” We must know who they are and how to learn from them.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

“You have not grasped a complex unity if all you know about it is how it is one. You must also know how it is many, not a many that consists of a lot of separate things, but an organized many.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Perhaps we would all like to love more richly than we do. Many novels are about love—most are, perhaps—and it gives us pleasure to identify with the loving characters. They are free, and we are not. But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our own loves are inadequate.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“In America, at least, the so-called ABC method was dominant throughout most of the nineteenth century. Children were taught to sound out the letters of the alphabet individually—hence the name of this method—and to combine them in syllables, first two letters at a time and then three and four, whether the syllables so constructed were meaningful or not. Thus, syllables such as ab, ac, ad, ib, ic were practiced for the sake of mastery of the language. When a child could name all of a determined number of combinations, he was said to know his ABC’s.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“We are not saying that a reader should not ultimately disagree and try to show where the author is wrong. We are saying only that he should be as prepared to agree as to disagree. Whichever he does should be motivated by one consideration alone—the facts, the truth about the case.”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

“It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).”
― Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading