No guide is needed.

Americans love to be told what to do. "You are what you eat!" sells innumerable quack diet books, just as "You are what you read!" brought us the Great Books, the Five-Foot Shelf, and now this colossal act of hubris: the mind-shaping favorites of a hundred professors, annotated. See them astride Plato, Darwin and Freud. Read what they read and be what they be.

I have no list to submit. I care not for this cargo cult. Books are cheap and readily available. To read is the thing, voraciously and eclectically. No guide is needed. Was Moby Dick more important to me than the latest Len Deighton thriller, or is browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary even more significant? And who should care?

Scientists are often regarded as illiterate oafs, unable to write and unwilling to read, captives of their narrow expertise, deserving candidates for humanists' contempt. Yet, most of us are well-read and can hold our own with historians, literary critics and whatever. Humanists, on the other hand, are often (though not always) scientifically and mathematically inept and proudly so. Our conversations must turn on matters of their concern, not ours. We are disadvantaged because we are compelled by their ignorance to match wits on their territory.

Membership in the community of educated men and women demands competence in science and awareness of its history. Many would dispute this claim. Here, I say, lies one explanation for the decline of American intellectualism. We have strayed from the path set by Franklin and Jefferson, who both admired and appreciated Lavoisier as much as they did Shakespeare.

- Sheldon Glashow, The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, 1986

You ought to be seated solemnly upon your stately throne

Amasis established the following daily routine for himself. He worked diligently on serious matters of government from dawn until the peak market hour*, but after that he would drink and banter with his drinking companions. His close friends and family were disturbed by this behavior and admonished him: "Sire, you are not conducting yourself properly by pursuing worthless pastimes. You ought to be seated solemnly upon your stately throne, conducting affairs of state throughout the day; that way, the Egyptians would know they were being governed by a competent man, and your reputation would improve. But as it is, you are not acting like a king." Amasis retorted: "When archers need to use their bows, they string them tightly, but when they have finished using them, they relax them. For if a bow remained tightly strung all the time, it would snap and be of no use when someone needed it. The same principle applies to the daily routine of a human being: if someone wants to work seriously all the time and not let himself ease off for his share of play, he will go insane without even knowing it, or at the least suffer a stroke. And it is because I recognize this maxim that I allot a share of my time to each aspect of life." This is how Amasis answered them.

- Herotodus, Histories, Book Two. Peak market hour was from 9 - 10 AM.

Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself

At drinking parties of wealthy Egyptians, they always follow the end of their dinner by having a man carry around a corpse made of wood inside a coffin. The wooden corpse is crafted so as to be most realistic, both in the way it is painted and in the way it is carved, and it measures altogether on to three feet in length. As the man displays it before each of the guests, he says, "Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself, for you will be like this when you are dead."

- Herotodus, Histories, Book Two

the books of the hour

For all books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.

- John Ruskin, as quoted on the excellent futilitycloset.com