The whole point of reading for enlightenment is not the number of books you read but how well you read them.
Abraham Lincoln read only a few books but he read them very well. And the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
— Mortimer Adler
The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
— Carl Sagan
