Excerpt: Have you forgotten of the astonishing magic of books? Oh no! You mustn’t scroll past this list until you read our quotes on reading! Quickly!
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Introduction: Do you even read, though?
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Breaking the shackles of time? Getting to curiously peer inside the mind of another human being? Communicating with people who have long since passed away? Well, when you put it like that, how could you NOT believe in magic? These little “flat objects” containing “funny dark squiggles” are nothing short of astonishing and are some of the most uniquely magical objects that you might ever find grasped within the palms of your two hands. Carl Sagan makes a convincing case.
This is all to say, “Do you even read, bro?” Or, maybe more importantly, do you live your life with this type of understanding and appreciation for books or have you forgotten about the magic that they contain? Because the vast majority have forgotten. Or, maybe more specifically, have forgotten about the magic since most of their reading was assigned, force-fed, tested, and graded. It’s one of the greatest contradictory effects of the formal education system, in my opinion—that people graduate wanting to read less than they did when they started their education.
In fact, in more cases than I’d care to research or look up, the magic of books completely dissipates as a result of formal education. As soon as you force someone to read something that they’re not interested in and then proceed to grade them on what they read—the funny dark squiggles lose their flare, the pages lose their vibrance, and the book itself turns into nothing more than a chore. It becomes a task and even a resentment rather than a step into another world or a conversation with a citizen of a distant epoch. And what an absolute travesty that is.
Now, this isn’t to say that we should never push people to read or challenge them on their comprehension. If left to our own devices, most of us would opt to sit on the couch, watch the tube, scroll through the never-ending timelines, and eat junk food to no end. Reading is an active task and active tasks usually require a little push to start. But, the push should be just enough to get the motor going so that it can sustain itself from there forward. Like the yank on the lawnmower cord to get the engine going. After the initial yank, the magic of the mower carries it away from there.
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What I feel happens all too often in formal education settings is that rather than yank and let the magic carry the students away, educators push students the whole way through. The engine never catches. It’s as though they are being forced to cut the grass with scissors. There’s no magic in that—it’s tedious, annoying, awful manual labor. And whenever grass cutting gets mentioned it will put a bad taste in their mouth and make their fingers quiver because of those past experiences. And as soon as they aren’t required to cut the grass anymore, they’ll probably never want to do it again—even if someone paid them. And who would blame them?!
But, as you and I both know, grass cutting doesn’t have to be done with scissors! There are magical machines that you can lightly push, ride, or even swing to make the task easy and enjoyable! The same is true for reading! It doesn’t have to be awful. It can even be more than enjoyable—it can be astonishing. And if you don’t believe me then you haven’t read the right books. And that’s what I would honestly say to anyone who doesn’t love reading. It isn’t because reading isn’t magical. It’s because you haven’t found the right books for your engine.
Just because you always cut grass with scissors doesn’t mean there aren’t any lawnmowers out there. And just because you remember always hating reading doesn’t mean there aren’t any great books out there that will light your engine up. It might take a few tries—like the yanking of the lawnmower cord—but I promise you, it will eventually start. And when it does, you too will gain the power to break the shackles of time, travel and peer into the minds of some of the most interesting people on the planet, and explore worlds that are beyond anything you could ever imagine. All you have to do is fold back a single page—no yanking of a cord with all of your might required. And your engine should take you from there.
The List: 40 Astonishing Quotes on Reading To Remind You Of The Magic Of Books
“A man is known by the books he reads.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own.”
Charles Spurgeon
“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
Confucius
“The person who doesn’t read is no better off than the person who can’t read.”
Unknown
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren [Buffett] reads – and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
Charles T. Munger
“It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.”
Seth Godin, Linchpin
“In the connected age, reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results. Reading leads to more reading. Writing leads to better writing. Better writing leads to a bigger audience and more value creation. And the process repeats.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
Read also: 15 Action Inspiring Seth Godin Quotes from Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck? (Enough Getting Them In A Row) ↗
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
Stephen King (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.”
Oprah Winfrey
“You open doors when you open books… doors that swing wide to unlimited horizons of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration that will enlarge the dimensions of your life.”
Wilfred Peterson, The Art of Living
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”
Joyce Carol Oates
“The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you’ve turned the last page. That is the power of literature, of a good play, of music; this is why we constantly want to expand our references.”
Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within
Read also: 44 Empowering Tony Robbins Quotes from Awaken the Giant Within ↗
“The experience of reading a book shouldn’t be about what we’re taught in school. The point is not to know what happened– it’s to respond emotionally and philosophically to the plot, characters and dialogue. A good novel transforms your worldview and informs the decisions you make in your daily life, both conscious and unconscious. Savor each page rather than trying to blaze through the book as if it’s some sort of competition. Some books are meant to be skimmed (often textbooks, interestingly enough), but if you’re reading a classic try to really enjoy it rather than focusing on the goal of being done with it. Focus on the value of each word, fragment, and sentence rather than ‘getting it’ or trying to digest a work in its entirety.”
Unknown, The Daily Zen
“As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we’ve missed the point.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”
Maya Angelou
“The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self
Read also: 20 Thomas Moore Quotes from Original Self on Life, Fulfillment, and Identity ↗
“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
Philip Pullman
“[On reading] I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.”
Leo Tolstoy, via Stillness is the Key (Page 65)
“Through books you can start today where the great thinkers of yesterday left off, because books have immortalized man’s knowledge. Thinkers, dead a thousand years, are as alive in their books today as when they walked the earth.”
Wilfred Peterson, The Art of Living
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
Charles W. Eliot
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
Helen Keller
“Reading can teach you the best of what others already know. Reflection can teach you the best of what only you can know.”
James Clear, Blog (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
“You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas or you can cheat by reading them in books.”
Patrick Collison
“People keep reading self-help and revisiting the same ideas because that’s precisely what we need: to be reminded. The problem is not that information is unhelpful, but that attention is fleeting. Nobody focuses on one idea every minute of the day. Good books refocus the mind.”
James Clear, Blog
“Reading is like a software update for your brain. Whenever you learn a new concept or idea, the “software” improves. You download new features and fix old bugs. In this way, reading a good book can give you a new way to view your life experiences. Your past is fixed, but your interpretation of it can change depending on the software you use to analyze it.”
James Clear, Blog
Read also: 10 Sobering James Clear Quotes on Making Progress from Atomic Habits ↗
“I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.”
Groucho Marx
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
Mortimer J. Adler
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
James Baldwin
“Compare the difference between the life of a man who does no reading and that of a man who does. The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what that ancient author looked like and what type of person he was… Now to be able to live two hours out of twelve in a different world and take one’s thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is, of course, a privilege to be envied by people shut up in their bodily prison.”
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
Oscar Wilde
“Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, – from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.”
Charles Kingsley
“Yet we are what we read. We are the educators of our own personalities. Certainly we have great influence in the crafting of our children. If we brought half the intelligence to the making of souls that we bring to the making of machines, we would be people of character and imagination. We would be sharp and therefore less inclined to kill and cheat each other. We would know where to find the deep pleasures, so we would be less desperate for shallow entertainments and the ephemeral gratifications of gadgets.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
Nora Ephron
“It isn’t what the book costs. It’s what it will cost you if you don’t read it.”
Jim Rohn
Picture Quotes on Reading:
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