How many quotes did Alan Jacobs wrote?

The author Alan Jacobs wrote around 28 of quotes.

28 Alan Jacobs Quotes on The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Delight and A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age

Q: What is the best Alan Jacobs quote?

"Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed." - Alan Jacobs

Q: What are some Alan Jacobs quotes?

"Those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without self-forgetfulness there can be no delight, and this is a great and grievous loss." "I would not be practicing love toward God OR my neighbour if I were to smile benignly on an unjust social order. It is not charitable to refrain from moral judgment: when Jesus says 'Judge not, lest ye be judged," he is forbidding condemnation, not discernment. There are times indeed when Christian charity demands that one speak forcibly." "We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is." - Alan Jacobs

Q: What are some short Alan Jacobs quotes?

"So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they'll be ready when the whim strikes you." "Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed." "…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought." - Alan Jacobs

And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

a first encounter with a worthwhile book is never a complete encounter, and we are usually in error to make it a final one.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The Narnian Quotes

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Shaming the Devil Quotes

Readers who wish to follow Whim rather than whim--readers who have learned enough about what he or she really thrives on to seek more of it--the first lesson must be in humility. . . . Don't waste time and mental energy in comparing yourself to others whether to your shame or gratification, since we are all wayfarers.

Humility Quotes Reading Quotes / Books Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

And he encourages Lewis to take the same chance he is taking, to count on the "perchance." And Lewis did. For the rest of his life he was a champion of the knowledge-giving power of myth, fantasy, Faery.

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis Quotes

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that "childhood reading experts" continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

His students were usually struck first by his appearance: he wore old tweed jackets until they fell apart, kept well into his fifties overcoats that he had inherited from Albert, and, with his ruddy complexion and hearty manner, reminded many students of a grocer or a butcher. But the voice soon captivated them. Little

The Narnian Quotes

So whether you're participating in an online conversation or reading a book by yourself, your experience is a readerly one and a responsive one. The most significant difference is that reading a book is dialogically asymmetrical: you learn about the book, about its characters and perhaps its author, but none of them learns anything about you. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily regrettable: many of us should probably spend more time just listening, rather than insisting on being heard.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow.

Bibliophilia Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

You can reread not from love or hatred but from a sense, often inchoate, that there's more to this book than you have ben yet able to receive.

Rereading Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan--the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness.

Escapism Quotes Rereading Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

For Lewis, Christian unity begins with the recognition that we have all, like Eustace, through our pride and selfishness, made ourselves into dragons. We must then understand that we cannot undragon ourselves—we lack the strength—and after that we must accept that God is ready and willing to undragon us, if we will but allow Him do to so. For Lewis, only those who share this picture of the human predicament and its cure can join together in true unity—can really, and not just nominally, become members of one another in a single Body.

The Narnian Quotes

Slow down. Make a point of revisiting passages that seem especially rich, or especially confusing, or for that matter especially offensive.

Reading Quotes / Books Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

In a lovely book called On Hope, Josef Pieper explores Thomas Aquinas' theology of hope along these lines: the hopeful person is by definition a wayfarer (viator), because the virtue of hope lies midway between the two vices of despair (desperatio) and presumption (praesumptio). What despairing persons and presumptuous persons have in common is that they aren't going anywhere, they are fixed in place: the despairing because they don't think there's anywhere to go, the presumptuous because they think they have reached the pinnacle of achievement.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

Objections to Christianity... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues.

Argument Quotes Christian apologetics Quotes Christianity Quotes Saint francis Quotes Semantics Quotes Stronger than language Quotes

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

Reading Quotes / Books Quotes Literature Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “cosmical and ethical hygiene.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

Thinking Quotes / Blog Quotes Blogs Quotes Information Quotes Internet Quotes Thought Quotes

Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do."So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.

Reading Quotes / Books Quotes The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

Christian writers, whether they like it or not, do not simply write for themselves; for good or ill, readers will see their work as reflecting Jesus Christ and his church. And if only for this reason - though there are other reasons - one must take great care when dealing with potentially controversial topics not to imagine one's every pronouncement preceded by 'Thus saith the Lord.' The law of love, on which 'all the law and the prophets' depend (Matt. 22:40), mandates charity toward one's opponents in argument.

A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age Quotes Argument Quotes Charity Quotes Debate Quotes

So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they'll be ready when the whim strikes you.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.

Stories Quotes / Power of stories Quotes Reason Quotes The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis Quotes The rational mind Quotes

We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.

Reading Quotes / The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

I would not be practicing love toward God OR my neighbour if I were to smile benignly on an unjust social order. It is not charitable to refrain from moral judgment: when Jesus says 'Judge not, lest ye be judged," he is forbidding condemnation, not discernment. There are times indeed when Christian charity demands that one speak forcibly.

A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age Quotes Ethics Quotes Jesus Quotes Judging actions Quotes Morality Quotes

Those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without self-forgetfulness there can be no delight, and this is a great and grievous loss.

Delight Quotes Innocence Quotes The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis Quotes

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.

Reading Quotes / The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

28 Alan Jacobs Quotes on The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Delight and A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age - Quotes.pub