Reading to Generate Ideas
KEYPOINTS Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind, open and eager to learn. Books are storehouses of ideas, thoughts, facts, opinions, descriptions, information and dreams. Some of these, removed from their setting, may connect to your present (or future) interests as a thinker. ‘Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body’, wrote Sir Richard Steele. Poetry and good prose – fact or fiction – requires the use of your imaginative and recreative powers. Therefore they provide you with an enjoyable way of developing those faculties. The real object of education is to take you to the condition of continuously asking questions. Under the hospitable roof of reading, studying and learning you will also find housed inspiring, kindling and infecting. ‘Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours’, wrote John Locke. Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back. Chinese proverb
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