Quotes by Writers - Page 158

The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)
Jean-Yves Leloup
I don't argue things being spiritual vs scientific, because I've never met anyone who knows enough about either to be convincing--including myself.
S. Kelley Harrell
By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors.
S. Kelley Harrell
Regardless of geographical region or culture gardening is perhaps the most common and shared experience of Nature.
S. Kelley Harrell
Ibn Mas'ud said that Allah's Messenger said: Abusing a Muslim is sinful and fighting with his tantamount to Kufr. Bukhari Muslim
Ahmad Von Denffer
The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it.
Aldous Huxley
The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.
Aldous Huxley
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
Joseph Campbell
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph Campbell
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)
Joseph Campbell
Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.
Loren Eiseley
Give me a book,” she said. “A book of sermons, anything.”“What do you want a book for?”“I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.
Hilary Mantel
Peace washed through her soul in the old store surrounded by thousands of books. This was her church and her place of worship.
A.W. Exley
I often find that once a child unlocks the secret of words, they hunger for them. There is a kind of magic in reading. It takes the mind to places where the body may not go, allowing one to forget, for a while, life's troubles.
Liana LeFey
Something in me - probably a small, nationalist dwarf part of my brain - something in me would like to feel proud of Dutch literature. But its hard to when the annual 'book week gift' year in year out is granted to a male. I dont like being part of an unjust system. But let me say this: it is the election method that is the real problem here. The 'vergadering' (meeting) that employs a simple flagging system - the basic way almost everything is decided here, from literary prizes to how much money is divided - it is a system based on the destruction of subtle values. You cannot ever ever say: I didnt understand this book. You can only say 'yes' or 'no'. And that system, that annihilates all forms of subtlety, that system is patriarchal in all its essence. So its useless to simply maintain the method, and try alter the outcome.
Martijn Benders
(...) and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
H.G.Wells
You taught me to think, and you put ideas in my head. People read to forget. Books don't change the world, ji. You didn't tell me that. You talked of the dignity of the human spirit to a hijra.
Faiqa Mansab
Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.
Pierre Bayard
Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
Pierre Bayard
Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)
John Clute
The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.
Pierre Bayard
I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter
Rebecca Lloyd
Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.
A.M. Homes
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Voltaire
Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?
Aileen Erin
They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?''It was books, admitted Miss Minton.And Maia said, 'Good.
Eva Ibbotson
I cannot live without reading.
Aidan Chambers
I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
Aaron Swartz
Book collecting is a full-time occupation, and one wouldn't get far if one took time off for frivolities like reading.
A.N.L. Munby
And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
Alberto Manguel
He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker
I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.
Lidia Yuknavitch
No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.
Alberto Manguel
Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.
Alberto Manguel
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...
Alberto Manguel
[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
Alberto Manguel
Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.
Pierre Bayard
We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.
Alberto Manguel
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Alberto Manguel
As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
Alberto Manguel
Personally, I believe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'd rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let's put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let's stop buying all our "American" products from sweat shops overseas and let's end poverty in third-world countries. Let's let film photography never go obsolete, let's let print books continue to be printed. Let's stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world's heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let's stop terrorism, let's stop animal cruelty, , let's stop overpopulation and urbanization, let's stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons......I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don't have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That's pathetic.
Rebecca McNutt
Librarians are your very best friend. And don't ever think otherwise.
Rett MacPherson
Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Alberto Manguel
History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
Holbrook Jackson
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Alberto Manguel
All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
Eugene Field
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
Oliver Goldsmith
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
Romain Rolland
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port
Anatole Broyard
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
Alberto Manguel
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Alberto Manguel
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel