14 April 2024

You are what you read

Bookmarked You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen.

Then a couple days later my wife sent me this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had never come across the parallel between eating and reading formulated so elegantly as in that quote by Emerson. Reading is to the mind what eating is to the body. As you must be mindful of what you eat, you must also be conscious of what you read.