“Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”– Dante Alighieri Related Quotes “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.”– Harold Bloom “A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”– Edith Hamilton “Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.”– Mary McLeod Bethune