I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill .

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems.

Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously.

Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.