Mark Pattison

"I wanted not merely to get up my classics, but to penetrate to the secrets and mysteries which I vaguely understood to be somehow wrapt up in books, though they had not, as yet, been revealed to me. I…"

"But there was in my father's mind another sentiment, less creditable to him, than the wish to give me the best education to be had. I mean those social aspirations which he continued to nourish, thoug…"

"... I began at the beginning, and read Hind's Logic, Whately's Logic, Reid's Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. But the book which was of most use to me on these subjects w…"

"About 1500 it seemed as if Europe was about to cast off at one effort the slough of feudal barbarism, and to step at once into the fair inheritance of the wisdom and culture of the ancient world. The …"

"My father's views for me, which were to guide his choice of college, were twofold. He really wanted me to learn; to get a good education, not so much with the idea of my making my way in the world, as…"

"A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas—ideas which have perhaps been tried and found wanting. As accumulated l…"

"Another book read this term seized upon my interest in an exceptional way, this was Gibbon's Autobiography. I had long before got hold of a few extracts from this, which had found their way into Lord …"

"In the Diary which begins 1845 there is a much larger infusion of secular matter. I find myself deep in the literary history of the eighteenth century, reading Gray's Correspondence, Prior's Life of G…"