Miskatonic University Press

Paired quotes

quotes

Two quotes I read today that struck me as connected:

"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." (Said by Nick Jenkins, the narrator, in Anthony Powell's The Valley of Bones, book seven in A Dance to the Music of Time.)

"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous." (Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted by Richard Feynman in the introduction to The Feynman Lectures on Physics, where he says he thinks the course he taught didn't go very well.)