#reading

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him. ↗

— James Salter

#reading #solitude #spiritual-needs #food

To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand. ↗

— Zoltan Kodaly

#build #child #developing #dictating #first

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#inspirational #reading #inspirational

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. ↗

— Irvine Welsh

#constantly #cultural #fiction #history #i

I've realized why I don't tell the truth in interviews. It's because they're printed months later, and you change so quickly - you have new thoughts, new everything - so people are reading an old version of you. ↗

— Nicholas Hoult

#change #everything #i #interviews #later

I learned easily and had time to follow my inclination for sports (light athletics and skiing) and chemistry, which I taught myself by reading all textbooks I could get. ↗

— Robert Huber

#chemistry #could #easily #follow #get

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other. ↗

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#believe #between #constant #hand #i

أوجعتني حينما خلفتني وحيدة ! ألملم شتات تساؤلاتي وأبحث عن رغيف فرح ، تتشبع به مشاعري الذابلة من بعد فقدك أفلت من يميني مودعاً وغادرتني بين طوفان الذبول .. تسألني عنك الأماكن والمقاعد ! تحدثني عن جنونك تلك الوسائد ، ترقب ملامحي كل تلك الوجوه ، كلما توارد إسمك ! خبأت وجهي بين راحتي الصمت ، حتى لا تخذلني أدمعي حينما تكسرني تساؤلاتهم بإفترقتما ؟ ↗

— نجلاء حسن

#faith #heart #love #reading #success

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. ↗

— Washington Irving

#equable #gifts #good nature #heaven #inexhaustible