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Books Quotes

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Books Quotes

“For peace read books, for success read books and take actions.”

“There's pain on all levels and all colors of the human skin. Many of us wear it well. The rest of us that you don't see are the ones who never learned to wear pain well. Or who learned and somewhere along the way decided it no longer fits.The irony is the more beautiful we wear our pain, the more we fool ourselves and others thinking there is no pain. The message. A bit more love and grace for myself and for friends and colleagues especially the ones that "have it all together" so beautifully.”

“Her zaman başka bir savaş çıkar, Robert. Kökleri hiçbir zaman tamamen kazınmaz. Savaşları ne alevlendirir? Güç arzusu, insan doğasının belkemiği. Şiddet tehdidi, şiddet korkusu ya da şiddetin kendisi bu dehşet verici arzunun aracıdır. Güç arzusunu yatak odalarında, mutfaklarda, fabrikalarda, sendikalarda ve devletlerin sınırlarında görebilirsin. Bunu iyi dinle ve aklına yaz. Ulus-devlet insan doğasının şişirilip devasa boyutlara getirilmiş halidir, o kadar. İşte bu yüzden, uluslar kanunları şiddetle yazılmış birimlerdir. Her zaman da öyleydiler, her zaman da öyle olacaklar. Savaş, Robert, insanlığın iki ebedi dostundan biridir.”

“It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned the last page of the book and closed the cover, Norah's connection to the writer felt absolute. It was a breathless, consuming rapture....”

“I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual giants who extract the gold within me, those who force me to read, to attend classes, seminars, conferences, and who steep me in an environment of perpetual growth and upward mobility. Not trying to be funny, but I've learned that I simply cannot afford to invest too much time around mediocrity. It's contagious.”

“There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. [Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]”

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”

“When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife. [The New York Times interview, 2000]”

“We humans love telling each other stories. . . we've done just that in caves, and in amphitheaters, and in the Globe, and in kitchens around campfires, and in the trenches. Every culture, every country, every type pf person in the world tell stories. They've been whispered and sung and written down on scraps of paper and they always, always been an indelible part of our very humanity.”

“I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world. [Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]”

“We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moments of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whiles all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes”

“In my 12th / Intermediate Level in Ravenshaw College, I read the novel "Train to Pakistan" by the great writer Khushwant Singh. I read the struggles and sadness of the people from both sides of the border in the partition that happened in 1947. I am poet, and I only believe in love and peace. We the homo sapiens are capable of great things, but let us not get narrow minded and hate each other. Our world needs more loving hearts.”