Convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking.

Big-picture thinkers broaden their outlook by striving to learn from every experience. They don't rest on their successes, they learn from them.

Experiences isn't the best teacher - evaluated experience is.

Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience.

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Few sometimes may know, when thousands err.

However, many books, Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

If I am through learning, I am through.

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. -John Wooden

Drink deeply from good books.