8组 For a great book is necessarily a gift ; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time . A civilized mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.