19 quotes
Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
In books may be found the recipes for manufacture of a steam-engine alongside the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
What a teacher imparts by word of mouth is nothing in comparison with what he teaches us to get for ourselves from books.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
A book exhales a subtle odor of spirituality throughout the place it adorns.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Is it possible to create a maintain a true culture, a strong and flourishing culture, through the medium of pictoral and oral apparatus?
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Aristocracy of the mind … is the only true aristocracy in my opinion. It is the essence, the very life of a well-built society.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
If humanity were to lose its libraries, not only would it be deprived of certain treasures of art, certain spiritual riches, but, more important still, it would lose its recipes for living.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Radio and cinema are daily playing a more and more important part, not only in the amusements of the twentieth-century man but also in the visible formation of his character.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Use your radio, but know how to distrust it—and do not let a day go by without reading and meditation if you want to save your soul, that soul which is yours and yours alone.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
When I say, “Beware of the radio if you want to improve your mind,” … I am warning the public against their worst enemy, conformity.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
The book is one of the springs of creative individualism, that individualism which, in these uncertain times, remains the guardian angel of human society. For five hundred years the book has been, for the solitary mind, an incomparable instrument of uplift and liberation.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
If the public gets out of the habit of reading they will not come back to it. We shall enter a new phase of our history from which there is no turning back.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
Radio, on the other hand, is now the chief agent of imperialism. It does not purify the spirit of man, does not, like the book, bring him back to the sanctuary of solitude, but throws him to the lions, subtly preparing his mind for the blood and chains of public sacrifice.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
The instinct to synthesize is a good one so long as it is concerned with elements that are capable of forming a whole. But today the man in the street is fed, morally as well as physically, on a mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet. There is no method in this madness, which is the very negation of culture.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
It is an extraordinary thing that this civilization, which wears out our nerves and exacts an almost painful effort from us in all our doings, should be at great pains to spare the mass of people that intellectual effort which is the only measure of true culture.
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)
… the cinema and the radio and the effect they have had in weakening the impulse to spiritual effort
Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters (1937)