The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,’The medicines of the soul.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.
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.
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.
Reading gave me hope.
You must feed your mind with reading material, thoughts, and ideas that open you to new possibilities.
Books were my pass to personal freedom.
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.
To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?
I don’t read newspapers in the morning. I take a look at the dailies in the afternoon, but only when I’ve finished my work for the day. Reading about what is happening in Turkey once again would only be demoralizing for me.
I’m a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work – which doesn’t take up that much time.
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
The Bible does not thrill; the Bible nourishes. Give time to the reading of the Bible and the recreating effect is as real as that of fresh air physically.
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
People who read are people who dream.
I don’t want people to think that they can attain realization simply by listening to others or by reading books. They must practice what they read and hear.