Quote by Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LI

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.


Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

Summary

This quote suggests that readers are intelligent and selective individuals who have their own preferences and tastes. They are not easily influenced or swayed by the words written by every author or using every writing style. Just as not every pen tempts a reader to pick it up and read, not every piece of writing will captivate or interest them. It highlights the importance of quality and uniqueness in writing to truly engage and appeal to readers.

Topics

Reading
By Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LI
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If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to an great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.

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