Lecture Quotes

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus

“Rien n'est plus dangereux qu'une société qui ne lit pas”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the Ingersoll's, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was 'Some Mistakes of Moses,' and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, -- Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, -- who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. Every variety of power was in this orator, -- logic and poetry, humor and imagination, simplicity and dramatic art, moral and boundless sympathy. The wonderful power which Washington's Attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to Thomas Paine of insinuating his ideas equally into learned and unlearned had passed from Paine's pen to Ingersoll's tongue. The effect on the people was indescribable. The large theatre was crowded from pit to dome. The people were carried from plaudits of his argument to loud laughter at his humorous sentences, and his flexible voice carried the sympathies of the assembly with it, at times moving them to tears by his pathos.

{Conway's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll}”
― Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East

“All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lecture to Art Students

“- A pan czy wierzy w duchy - spytał prelegenta jeden ze słuchaczy.
- Oczywiście, że nie - odparł prelegent, po czym z wolna rozpłynął
się w powietrzu.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Понедельник начинается в субботу

“Dans 1984, les livres sont plus ou moins interdits. Aujourd'hui le problème est réglé, pas la peine de les interdire: les gens n'ont plus vraiment envie de lire, de toute façon, ils savent de moins en moins lire, même le journal. ("La violence des casseroles", http://www.lapresse.ca/debats/chroniq...)”
― Pierre Foglia

“So she was waiting for the lecture; prolonged silence always led to the lecture. It was the last thing Sarah needed, and a list of the first things would have filled a book: a hug, a bath, an ear, some sympathy.”
― Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road

“(...) combien de fois avait-il rêvé, entre ces lignes (...)”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl

“Lire, c'est voyager;
Voyager, c'est lire.”
― Victor Hugo

“La liberté commence là où l'ignorance finit.”
― Victor Hugo

“Pour voyager loin, il n'y a pas de meilleur navire qu'un livre.”
― Emily Dickinson

“La lecture l’a déverrouillée. Comme si le jour la pénétrait enfin et ressortait par tous les pores de sa peau. Elle bouge comme une femme qui porte enfin des robes légères après un très très long hiver.”
― Valérie Perrin, Les Oubliés du dimanche

“Lire ressemble à regarder à l'horizon. D'abord on ne voit qu'une ligne noir. Puis on imagine des mondes.”
― orsenna

“Borges - his blind face like an Aztec woman's, that old shyster of metaphor, across whose open eyes pass flashes of magnesium without affecting him. The blind always seem to be holding their heads out of water. Yet they are gifted in unreality and cunning. I am sure he knows down to ten people how many are there to hear him, simply by listening, by sensing. The lecture is hopeless, but it is a sacrificial ceremony. The listeners are overwhelmed by the intelligence of this man whose cunning ploy is to make it seem as though he were speaking from beyond the grave, as if he were already dead. His muffled, syncopated, barely audible voice condemns the others to silence in the same way as he is condemned to the night. All the metaphors he uses are those of the night, including the thousand and first night, the finest since it is one added to eternity. He is without doubt also in his eighty-four-and-first year - i.e. he has one foot in eternity. There reigns all about him an ironic and cruel affectation. I don't know what animal he resembles. He has a soft spot for the tiger. Put a tiger in your liltrary and take away its sight: that's Borges. In this vegetation of Californian academics' soft encephalons, his silences carve lethal spirals. Since he can no longer see the world, he quotes it. His speech is one long quotation. ' Life itself is a quotation ', he says.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Don't live on your goddamn computers, and the internet, and all that crap. Go to the library. Don't let them flim-flam you into owning all these devices...”
― Ray Bradbury

“Au cours de ces semaines, j’avais commencé une lecture qui avait fait sur moi une impression plus profonde que toutes les lectures faites jusqu’à ce jour. Plus tard aussi, il est peu de livres qui m’aient donné autant, sauf Nietzsche peut-être.”
― Hermann Hesse

“A good teacher must be able to make his/her lecture riveting and entertaining enough to deter truants from playing truant.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“وإذا كانتِ النُفوسُ كِباراً *** تَعِبَتْ في مُرادِها الأَجسامُ”
― أبو الطيب المتنبي

“As students in the 1950s we were conditioned into despising the excesses of baroque/rococo architecture; that is, until we were reprogrammed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Slade lectures at Cambridge.”
― Peter F. Smith, The Dynamics of Delight

“A professor's duty is to lecture.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Giff waited out the storm, admiring — and certainly not for the first time — Hugo's gift for shredding a man's character thoroughly and at length without pausing even once to think of the right word.”
― Amanda Scott, King of Storms

“Lire c'est rêver les yeux ouverts.”
― Kerry Reichs

“Les histoires de ma mère, accompagnées de sa voix en colère, amusée, malgré tout reconnaissante à sa jeunesse, faisaient passer mes douleurs. J’oubliais même que j’existais quand elle racontait. J’étais un petit sac vide rempli du souffle de ses histoires. Quand elle en avait assez, elle s’interrompait brusquement. « Maintenant ça suffit. » Le petit sac en papier crevait brusquement. Et je redevenais moi-même.”
― Erri De Luca, I pesci non chiudono gli occhi

“En lisant, on rencontre des phrases sismiques.”
― Erri De Luca, I pesci non chiudono gli occhi

“That you have to talk about only one thing many times does not mean that you have to say one thing many times.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“Les gens heureux n'ont que faire de la littérature. J'en suis persuadé. Les êtres humains profondément heureux et ceux qui ne ressentent pas la tristesse, n'ont pas besoin des arts ou de la littérature dans leur vie.”
― Maki Marukido, Pornographer Playback

“So "the medium is the message" is not a simple remark, and l've always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation, and the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology.”
― Marshal McLuhan

“L’étude a été pour moi le souverain remède contre les dégouts de la vie, n’ayant jamais eu de chagrin qu’une heure de lecture n’ait dissipé.”
― Montesquieu , Lettres persanes, Montesquieu