It is important to realize that man possesses only one tool for his highly critical appraisal of experience, namely, words. Life’s meaning is contained, fabricated and elaborated primarily in words. Words give man the motivation to act, and words justify the act. Life-meaning for man is predominantly an edifice of words and word sounds. …
The person who can put more words together in more varied combinations has, theoretically, a larger world in which to move. [Ernest Becker, The Ernest Becker Reader, edited by Daniel Liechty, Ernest Becker Foundation / Washington UP, 2005, pp. 43-44, 87]
[O]ur language habits are at the core of how we imagine the world. And to the degree that we are unaware of how our ways of talking put such ideas in our heads, we are not in full control of our situation. It needs hardly to be said that one of the purposes of an education is to give us greater control of our situation. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, p. 175]
[W]e use language to create the world—which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is, as Wittgenstein said, also the driver. We go where it leads. We see the world as it permits us to see it. … Is anyone in our schools taking this seriously? …
By failing to reveal the story of human beings as world-makers through language, [teachers] miss several profound opportunities. They fail, for example, to convey the idea that there is an inescapable moral dimension to how we use language. … To use language to defend the indefensible (as George Orwell claimed some of us habitually do), to use language to transform certain human beings into nonpersons, to use language to lie and to blur distinctions, to say more than you know or can know, to take the name of truth in vain—these are offenses against a moral order, and they can, incidentally, be committed with excellent pronunciation or with impeccable grammar and spelling. Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension … [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 83-85]
Dale Carnegie’s unambiguous message: “It matters not what you mean: you and those around you become according to what you say.” This simple and crucial fact for understanding human behavior stares us so disarmingly in the face that we pass on to more involved and less important things. The proper word or phrase, properly delivered, is the highest attainment of human interpersonal power. …
We already saw that this fact is central to the development of the ego, how magically the child gets his gratification if he learns the right words. The word, a mere sound, miraculously obliges the adult to do one’s bidding; it brings food and warmth, and closeness. The word which pleases the angry adult transforms him before one’s eyes into a smiling, appreciative protector. So it is no wonder that in our adult life we carry over some of this early enchantment with the magical efficacy of words, this conviction that everything in the universe can hang delicately on the proper sound … [Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Free Press, 1971, pp. 93-94]
The highest function of education, I maintain, is to help people understand the meaning of their lives … If we are to transcend our own immediate environment, we must have access to the record of past and present, learn the skills needed to interpret it, and learn to tell good data from poor … We must be able to read, and to know where what we read fits into the structure of human experience; and to write with enough subtlety and complexity to convey the special quality of our mind to others. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage / Random House, 1965, pp. 221-224]
To give to our thoughts their genuine and appropriate language, is one of the most wholesome exercises in which we can be engaged. Without this exercise it is scarcely possible that we should learn to think with precision and correctness. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 1797, Garland, 1971, p. 149, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
I’m teaching this [poetry] class because you, in order to lead the lives that you want, need to understand the power of language. You need to be able to hear language and know what it means. You have to hear language and know what it implies. You have to hear language and know what is not being said and what is being said. You have to develop your own power of articulation to be able to express what you know and what you want. … I’m going to work with you, through poetry, to increase your command of language, and your ability for self-presentation. …
[In my class,] I was giving [students] an introduction to an art-form that is as old as any human activity. And I wanted them to hear how people had shaped sound to capture and convey meaning. … Robert Frost [said], “Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” … You’re not just learning about language; this language is a way of seeing the world that actually exists. … [My students were] converted to the notion that [poetry] was one of the vessels of human wisdom in which they can participate. And by learning it and by reading it and by memorizing it they were awakening themselves to their own sense of their own human capacity. [Dana Gioia, “The Deepest Conversation I’ve Ever Had About Writing,” YouTube, uploaded by David Perell, 26 Feb. 2025, 1:10:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvfLmbHkBV4]
Reading is intimately tied to writing. The most important thing to read is your own writing … [b]ut, beyond your own writing, reading is really the key to entering the conceptual world. It is the means of independent access to the accumulated knowledge and ideas of the whole of human history. …
[W]riting [is] a tool of life and thought that is not restricted to English classes. Writing is a skill that is essential to every subject and is a continuous part of the curriculum. … Every teacher should be a teacher of English. …
[Writing] is a necessity of mind training, a necessity of learning the proper use of concepts, a necessity of learning exact, logical thought. It is impossible to organize your thoughts on any complex subject without the use of written formulations. … You must get your thinking in front of you in some shape that you can hold and slowly review and study from different aspects. …
You cannot distinguish between perfecting your thinking and perfecting your writing. Editing or revising your writing is the process of perfecting your thinking and there is no other way to do it. [Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think: A Philosophy of Education Based on the Principles of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, edited by Marlene Trollope, Ayn Rand Institute, 2014, pp. 44-46]
The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important. …
[I]f you want to have a life characterized by competence, productivity, security, originality and engagement … you need to think carefully about important issues. There is no better way to do so than to write. …
If you sharpen your capacity to think and to communicate as a consequence of writing, you are better armed. The pen is mightier than the sword, as the saying goes. This is no cheap cliché. Ideas change the world, particularly when they are written. …
If you learn to write and to edit, you will also be able to tell the difference between good ideas, intelligently presented, and bad ideas put forth by murky and unskilled thinkers. … Then you can be properly influenced by profound and solid ideas instead of falling prey to foolish fads and whims and ideologies, which can range in their danger from trivial to mortal. …
Those who can think and communicate are simply more powerful than those who cannot, and powerful in the good way, the way that means “able to do a wide range of things competently and efficiently.” …
Don’t ever underestimate the power of words. [Jordan Peterson, “Essay Writing Guide,” 2018, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://jordanbpeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Essay_Writing_Guide.docx]
[W]riting is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.
A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. …
[I]f you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who’s not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems.
You can’t think well without writing well, and you can’t write well without reading well. And I mean that last “well” in both senses. You have to be good at reading (at extracting meaning from words), and read good things. [Paul Graham, “The Need to Read,” Nov. 2022, http://www.paulgraham.com/read.html]
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought. … [P]utting your ideas into words change[s] them. …
The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it. [Paul Graham, “Putting Ideas Into Words,” Feb. 2022, http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html]
[W]e learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down. What we normally imagine as “thinking” is really just a distracted form of writing, like having a disoriented drunk at a typewriter behind your eyes. Writing sobers him up. The pen (or the word processor) lets the mind compose language into knowledge that’s far more sophisticated than what the little boozer can do on his own.
On the spectrum of sophistication, speaking falls somewhere between thinking and writing, but it’s the form of language (or thought) construction we use the most. I find that once I articulate something in speech, it sticks in my mind more or less intact—but only for a little while. If it’s a thought I want to build on, writing is the only option. Otherwise, it will gradually get pulled into the quicksand of my consciousness, forgotten or folded into a mix of ill-considered motivations. [Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions, Atria / Simon & Schuster, 2022, p. 7]
Writing, which reflects the quality of your thinking, is significantly improved if you steep yourself in literature.
A broad exposure to the skilled, evocative use of concepts and an analysis of how literature achieves precise cognition and emotional effects is invaluable training for your own use of concepts. … It will improve your precision, clarity, and proficiency at using words to express your own thoughts. [Leonard Peikoff, Teaching Johnny to Think: A Philosophy of Education Based on the Principles of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, edited by Marlene Trollope, Ayn Rand Institute, 2014, p. 55]
[T]he addiction to useless info leads to what I call “intellectual obesity.” …
The way I beat intellectual obesity was by trying to become the best writer I can be. Writing requires you to filter out bad information because you have a duty to your readers to not be full of shit. Writing also forces you to periodically shut out information altogether so you can be alone with your thoughts. This regular confrontation with yourself helps you keep your bearings in a world constantly trying to lure you away from your brain. [Gurwinder, “The Intellectual Obesity Crisis,” Substack, 12 May 2022, https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis]
Every time you’re on stage, or every time you write something for someone else to read, all the people in the audience, all the people who read your writing, are giving you the honor of time they could be spending elsewhere. You are responsible for every second they give you. You need to give them gifts—including the truth as you understand it to be—commensurate with that every moment. [Milbre Burch] quoted by [Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, pp. 27-28]
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. [Aldous Huxley] quoted by [Lawrence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time, Bantam, 1977, pp. 50-54]
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice … and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. [Gilbert Highet] quoted by [Lawrence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time, Bantam, 1977, pp. 50-54]
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. [Mark Twain] quoted by [Lawrence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time, Bantam, 1977, pp. 50-54]
The way a book is read—which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book—can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it … Anyone who can read can learn how to read deeply and thus live more fully. [Norman Cousins] quoted by [Lawrence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time, Bantam, 1977, pp. 50-54]
One must be an inventor to read well. … There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 69]
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read … It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. [S. I. Hayakawa] quoted by [Lawrence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas For Our Time, Bantam, 1977, pp. 50-54]
Reading a physical book in a slow, deliberative, and careful manner sharpens a type of innovative, empathetic, creative, and critical thinking that is otherwise hard for humans to access. It requires us to literally rewire our brain to do that type of thinking, and without a concerted effort we will not develop those skills. If we avoid the slow and deliberate reading of actual physical books, if we mainly consume information on screens … the sophistication with which [we] understand and later make sense of information is decreased. …
We need to think about a serious reading habit as an exceptional activity, one that you need to isolate and support and really prioritize in your life. … I’m increasingly convinced that the serious reading of good books needs to be in all our personal definitions of a deep life. [Cal Newport, “The Joys of the Reading Life,” YouTube, uploaded by Cal Newport, 6 March 2023, 15:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807retANzfA]
I think that unless you read deeply and in your own interest, unless you explore what is most profound in what has come before you, then you never will get down to the recesses of your own self. You never learn what Ralph Waldo Emerson called self-trust and self-reliance. And most deeply perhaps, you never will heal the self. I think that in a culture which has all of the peculiar difficulties and complexities of the one currently developing around us, there is nothing more profoundly healing than the act of solitary reading, provided that what is being read is indeed permanent, deep, lasting work—work that calls for all of your faculties in response, … work that transforms you. [Harold Bloom, interview with Charlie Rose, 11 July 2000, 6:25, https://charlierose.com/videos/5604]
Ultimately we read—as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree—in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests. …
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, more authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. … There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads. [Harold Bloom, How To Read And Why, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 2000, pp. 22, 28-29]
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 68]
The English major is, first of all, a reader. … [He] reads because as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. … [He] wants the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of changing minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austin is one that is incomparably enriching. It makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined was possible. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought.
Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. … If the English major has the wherewithal for it, the energy and the openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. …
Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth or truths: Those are the qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we’re talking about more than a mere academic major. We’re talking about a way of life. We’re talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world—what to be, how to act, how to move through time—at its center. What we’re talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 112-114, 118]
The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be—and act—human. [Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, pp. 166-167]
Related:
– How or why should we incorporate the spiritual, sacred, or transcendent in education?