I heard a quote recently and I've been turning it over in my mind; I think it is an interesting and profound thought. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think:
"A man or woman is the same person a year from now except for the books they read and the people they meet."
It was said at the Christian Heritage Conference by Doug Phillips, one of the speakers. I think he attributed it to his dad.
So, reading...ya, I agree with this one! And meeting people...what a great way to learn! The only thing that I wonder about is the discounting of experience as a teacher. I've always thought that just by living and walking through different situations I would learn; of course I have to have an attitude to learn in every situation and a willingness to change but human experience is a powerful thing.
Or is it? Is it necessary to live to learn? Is it just as valuable to read from the wisdom and folly of mankind, read the true words of God in the Bible, to meet as many different people as possible as it is just plugging along in my everyday routine?
Perhaps by introducing good books and wise people into a normal routine, one's life can become better. Maybe that's more what the quote is talking about. Interesting!
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2 comments:
You always make me think so much that my brain hurts!
"Publishing remains despite all a moral enterprise, and is recognized as such in its heart of hearts even by the public that clamors for gratification of its appetites. The sensational, the vulgar, the lurid, teh cheap, the hackneyed--there is an innocence about these things in their conventional and mass-produced forms, even a kind of virtue; the novelists everyone purchases do no harm as they line our pockets and their own. They are not difficult; they do not astonish; they rebel along traditional lines, shock us in customary ways, and teach us what we know already. Their concerns are modest, their literary voice and manner are seldom wild, only their private lives, which make good copy: in straightforward prose they reveal to us how it is to belong to certain racial or cultural minorities; how it is to be an adolescent, a narcotic, an adulterer, a vagabond; especially how it is to be the Author, with his particular little history of self-loathings and aggrandizements. Such novels, I conceive, are the printed dreams of that tiny fraction of our populace which buys and reads books, and the true dwelling-places of art and profit. In serving the dream we prevent the deed: vicariously the reader debauches, and is vicariously redeemed; his understanding is not taxed; his natural depravity may be tickled but is not finally approved of; no assaults have been made upon his imagination, nor any great burden put on his attention. He is the same fellow as before, only a little better read, and in most cases the healthier for his small flirtation with the Pit. He may even remark, 'Life is absurd, don't you think? There's no answer to anything"; whereafter, his luncheon-companion agreeing absolutely, they have another cocktail and return to more agreeable matters."
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