Quotes about Books

My life is -- as if each person I know was born with a beautiful book with golden edges on each page -- and each of us can read the language of our own book -- containing our own unique values, ideas, insights and direction, yet we cannot read the language of anyone else's book, and they cannot read our book.  And, then, you and I started talking and I discovered that while the words in your book are different from mine, the language of your book is exactly the same as mine -- and words flow and flow between us without effort.  Then, I looked closer in my book and I saw beautiful, happy pictures of you and your family...and I smiled.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

People talk over situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.

If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud -- you are all that, and that is love.

Albert Camus: After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

So, how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book  rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

All is forgiven, move on.

My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books. As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

"Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend."

"Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you."

          

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

" 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly.  'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.' "

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. ..."

Youth is a beautiful dream, on whose brightness books shed a blinding dust. Will ever the day come when the wise link the joy of knowledge to youth's dream? Will ever the day come when Nature becomes the teacher of man, humanity his book and life his school? Youth's joyous purpose cannot be fulfilled until that day comes. Too slow is our march toward spiritual elevation, because we make so little use of youth's ardor.

Some countries of the world are like people fighting on a large boat. In the middle of their battle over how to catch the biggest fish, they look up and realize that the fine boat is sinking, and everyone is going down.  Their next fight will be for basic survival, and they will need to rely on one another, floating far from shore in the angry sea.

There is a rhythm throughout the universe. The pulsation throbs within every heart, during each moment of ecstacy, in every birth contraction. The rhythm exists in the pull of the ocean tide, around the weight of each raindrop, woven into every cocoon.
The sequence, the progression, is what we call time. Our time of influence affects the expansion of the universe. Heaven is eager to learn how we will add to the growth of eternal existence.
God is ready to respond as you take part in creation.
The rhythm never ends, it only strengthens and expands.
This life force is you. You are the mystery.
You are the journey. You are exquisite.
You are here.
Now, it's your time.

If none of us ever read a book that was
'dangerous,' nor had a friend who was 'different,' or never joined an
organization that advocated 'change,' we would all be just the kind of
people Joe McCarthy wants.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself." (Hesse in Reading in Bed, ed. by Steven Gilbar, 1974)

With books I slip out of my life and am with the choicest company.