From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
But the reward of reading with a humanistic eye is not in doubt: it is pleasure, renewable at will. That pleasure is the ultimate use of the classics. All the great judges of human existence have said so, from Milton who called reading "conversation with the master spirits" to Virginia Woolf, who imagined the Almighty saying to St. Peter about some newcomers to heaven: "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them . . .They have loved reading." I can only add one thing: it is always time to stop repeating the wise sayings and begin to believe them.
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