Thoughts
There are a lot of good one-liners in The Count obviously, but one of my favorite is Faria explaining, well,
> In Rome, I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library. By
reading and re-reading them, I discovered that one hundred and
fifty books, carefully chosen, give you, if not a complete summary
of human knowledge, at least everything that it is useful for a man
to know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and re-reading
these hundred and fifty volumes, so that when I was arrested I knew
them more or less by heart. In prison, with a slight effort of
memory, I recalled them entirely.
Three comments: 1) what an anthropology and epistemology from the author. What a statement about man and knowledge. 2) Ah, to live 200 years ago when all human knowledge fit in 150 books. No history after Napoleon, no world wars, no cold wars. No atomic or relativistic physics, no electricity, no computer science at all. 3) One of the things that makes this book so fun and effective is that Dumas is willing to write-away stuff like acquiring knowledge, leaving us time to read 100 pages of various characters’ suicidal ideations.