Science Quote by Isaac Asimov

Asimov is carving a quiet pedestal for the kind of intelligence that doesn’t confuse intake with insight. The sentence begins with a faintly needling concession - “He had read much, if one considers his long life” - as if the obvious metric (pages consumed) can only be defended by stretching the timeline. Then the pivot: “contemplation” outranks “reading,” not as anti-intellectual posturing but as a rebuke to credential-chasing. It’s the difference between collecting facts and metabolizing them.

The subtext is almost an insult to the age-old male sport of appearing well-read. “If he had read as much as other men…” lands like a paradoxical boast: I read less, therefore I know more. Asimov, a famously prolific reader and writer, is also smuggling in a scientist’s ethic. Knowledge isn’t a library card; it’s a model you build, test, revise. Contemplation here means synthesis: running ideas against experience, asking what follows, what breaks, what generalizes.

Context matters. Asimov wrote from inside a 20th-century culture that increasingly treated expertise as an accumulation of information - and from inside science, where progress often comes from seeing what everyone else missed in the same pile of data. The line flatters the solitary thinker, yes, but it’s also a warning: reading can become a way to outsource judgment. The sharpest minds aren’t the fullest hard drives; they’re the best editors.