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Literature Quotes

    “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

    Carl Sagan Quote on Books and How They Are Proof That We Are Capable of Working Magic

      “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

      Beyond the Quote (303/365)

      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.

      Read More »Carl Sagan Quote on Books and How They Are Proof That We Are Capable of Working Magic

        “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 | ★ Featured on this book list.

          “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 | ★ Featured on this book list.

            “In my own experience, it is often the brief, simple, original books that turn out to be the most useful. The books I have on my special shelf—books for personal, lifelong use—are all brief and untraditionally structured. They are almost all illustrated, and they have considerable blank space on a page. These are not sources of information but books for meditation. A book is virtual space that invites contemplation and perusal. In this space one tarries and looks around, absorbing the atmosphere, and then leaves, the author hopes, happy to have visited.”

            Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.

              “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere.  Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still  turning those impressions into sentences.  Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.  Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.” ~ Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness

                “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.” ~ Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within