the human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

T]he Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced...

What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from the chair, the world was new to him by a presentment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed was knowledge.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

I'm a constant learner. You need to be a constant student because things change and you have to change and grow. And I emphasize the word 'grow.'

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.

Now, I'm a failed political consultant. But sometimes fiction has a way of capturing people's imagination in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Conservatives typically haven't written much fiction - specifically political thrillers - over the years to educate, inspire and mobilize people on issues of great import, but we ought to.

Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.

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