Reading For Life Quotes

You can't keep living without breathing; don't keep living without reading! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If a book can save - redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane - surely, there must be a God. ~ Chila Woychik

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought. ~ Lawrence Durrell

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it's an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege. ~ Umberto Eco

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life. ~ Anna Quindlen

Reading leads to a lifetime of learning ~ Laura Bullock

I have found that reading is much better than a good sleep. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading self-improvement books is like creating a mental savings account from which we can withdraw viable tools for what we perceive as tough days. ~ Dr. Jacent Mpalyenkana, Ph.D. MBA

Our constant desire to genre-label cripples new writers. Let them experiment, explore and surprise. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Why do I read? To know that I am alive. To know that hope and humanity exist in the world. To remember that some people spend years of their life, not watching reality TV or pornography, but trying to create something meaningful and lasting and beautiful. I read to know what is possible. ~ Gea Haff

Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race. ~ Aman Jassal

A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it. ~ Aman Jassal

When you travel, learn the history of the place. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There are books that change our perspectives and books that change our personalities. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I always looked for a place where I could sit in solace and read, and you know what offered me that comfortable solitude? Books. ~ Neeraj Agnihotri

If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice. ~ Aman Jassal

The more you read within a balanced life, the more time you have. Strange but true. ~ Mark Donnelly

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents. ~ Sven Birkerts

Everything you read, becomes a part of your life. ~ Aman Jassal

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are ~ Someone

Good stories never wear out, re-gift a book! ~ Nanette L. Avery

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993) ~ Peter F. Drucker

what are inside books may not all that necessarily be different from what are outside books at all ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Everything I ever learned, I learned from books. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Everyone wants to be happy and live mindfully. Books teach us how to resuscitate the body and soul and how to recognize what in our own personal lives is worthy of noticing. Writers' considered opinions and subtle observations regarding the joys, paradoxes, pains, tragedies, and truths of living provide us with a jumpstart in analyzing how best to integrate our personal experiences and disjointed thoughts into a cogent belief system. An artistic person understands their passions demand a struggle. Reading allows me unobtrusively to discover how other people freed themselves from suffering a destructive life of attachment, delusion, and disablement. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A classic is read not to enjoy but only to be boast about it. ~ Aman Jassal

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf. ~ Erri De Luca

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books? ~ Gabrielle Zevin

A person can escape an ingrained pattern of mental incapacity or 'non compos mentis' ("no power of the mind") by reading, writing, thinking, and studying their environment for telling external determinates that will shape a journey of the mind, body, and soul. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you read a book which does not make you wonder, ponder! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I love buying and collecting good books: I am passionate reader. This is my sacred life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A book is a drop in the ocean of knowledge, in the ocean of knowledge every reader is drowned in the thoughts of what to read?. ~ Luffina Lourduraj

So many great books to read, when will I finish reading all these books? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Deep reading is always about *connection*: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world. ~ Maryanne Wolf

Everytime I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. ~ Padma Venkatraman

Even for studies, where expenditure is most honorable, it is justifiable only so long as it is kept within bounds. What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is, not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many. ~ Seneca.

Reading books exposes us to the consistency and uniqueness of being human. Book reading is an investigatory process. We read books in order to encounter the orchestrated words that describe emotions and observations that we too have experienced but are unable to glean the right alignment of words that fully embody the resonance that we seek. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew. ~ Anna Quindlen

Every reading is a misreading. ~ Phyllis Rose

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'. ~ Anna Quindlen

Father, you created all things simply with your words. One word from you and your power is evident. I am amazed by you. I need your power in my life, God. I face impossible circumstances and am desperate for a miracle. Would you show me your power in my life today? God, for those who have a small view of you, show them how mighty and enormous you actually are. Help them to find comfort in that knowledge. Thank you for sending your Son, who has made our relationship with you possible. It's in the all-powerful name of Jesus that I pray, amen. ~ Max Lucado

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong. ~ Henry James

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life's beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you'll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you'll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget. ~ Romain Gary

The 16 characteristics of psychopaths:

1. Intelligent
2. Rational
3. Calm
4. Unreliable
5. Insincere
6. Without shame or remorse
7. Having poor judgment
8. Without capacity for love
9. Unemotional
10. Poor insight
11. Indifferent to the trust or kindness of others
12. Overreactive to alcohol
13. Suicidal
14. Impersonal sex life
15. Lacking long-term goals
16. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior ~ Hervey M. Cleckley

Life is a mixture of experiences - some sweet and some bitter. The Bible abounds in examples and stories of people, and it tells us that without faith we can never please God. We must learn how to trust Him, and trust is developed in private, but it's always shown up in difficult experiences we have in life. So difficulties are an opportunity for us to grow because they reveal our heart condition. ~ Mike Connell

Loneliness is a liar," Graham told me, sitting down on the edge of his bed as he spoke. "It's toxic and deadly most of the time. It forces people to believe they are better off with the devil himself than being alone, because somehow being alone means a person failed. Somehow being alone means a person isn't good enough. So, more often than not, the poison of loneliness seeps in and makes a person believe that any kind of attention must stand for love. Fake love that is built on a bed of loneliness will fail - I should know. I've been alone all my life. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

Four Rules For Life Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results. ~ Angeles Arrien

Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping."

"Mr. Rochester, I must leave you."

"For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair - which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face - which looks feverish?"

"I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes."

"Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester - both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error - to make you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic."

His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed: still I dared to speak.

"Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical - is false."

"Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man - you forget that: I am not ~ Charlotte Bronte

Yes, my life is a life of combat; I can say that this has never stopped for a single instant. It is a combat that started for me at the age of 16. I'm 90 years old now, and my motivation hasn't changed; it's the same fervour that drives me. ~ Ahmed Ben Bella

If Jenks and she were to be believed, I structured my life to be as horrific as possible to have fun in bed, but having Ivy mad at me might be too much for even me right now. ~ Kim Harrison

I've met some serious aliens in my life, for sure. I'm sure you've seen a UFO. Haven't all of us seen something flying in the sky, and it's at some random time of night that doesn't make sense, and it's not the shape of a plane? I don't know if I'd go with an alien to space. I would have to feel the alien's vibe. I'm a vibe person. ~ Alicia Keys

Can you understand,' asked my father, 'the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mache, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,' he continued with a pained smile, 'the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness. ~ Bruno Schulz

I changed my mind about not saying what I think. If you let people walk over you while you're young, you should get used to wearing feet marks across your face for the rest of your life. ~ Esm� Raji Codell

Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive. ~ John Grisham

Sharing our depressions felt like having survived a war. The experience bonds you to the other person for life. ~ Art Buchwald

The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable....he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, for every grace, through all the long years. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Life, my dear Mamselle, can't be reckoned up correctly without cooking the accounts a bit, and our mistake lies in this: that when we grapple with great things, we never take the human coefficient into consideration. All the confusion comes from that...Don't be upset by the coefficient, Mamselle. It contains all the savor and glamor of life. Otherwise every lout would just drink up life to the dregs, and then put a bullet into his brain...Because then his brain would ask for something beyond life...No matter what happens, keep on living, Mamselle. A living human being is, after all, Nature's most beautiful creation. ~ Leonid Leonov

We have our little space and our little time. We need to use it as best we can. We need to make memories, even if only for ourselves. ~ Neville Stocks

No one wants to suffer. No one wants to be lonely. No one wants to live in fear. No one wants to lose everything. No one wants their heart ripped to shreds. No one want to be sick. And, no one wants to die. But these things happen in life. So the least we can do is be there for others, as we would like others to be there for us. ~ Bryant McGill

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life. ~ Aristotle.

But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a measure of success. It is a measure of failure. Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill. ~ Atul Gawande

What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven't done. ~ Tom Hurndall

There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods. ~ Robert Smith

10For the death he died he died to sin, e once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11So you also must consider yourselves f dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. ~ Anonymous

A voice said, "Climb." And he said, "How shall I climb?the mountains are so steep that I cannot climb."
The voice said, "Climb or die."
He said, "But how?I see no way up those steep ascents. This that is asked is too hard for me."
The voice said, "Climb, or perish, soul and body of theemind and spirit of thee. There is no second chance for any son of man. Climb or die."
Then he remembered that he had read in the books of the bravest climbers on the hills of the earth that sometimes they were aware of the presence of a Companion on the mountains who was not one of the earthly party of climbers.
And he rememberd a word in the Book of Mountaineers ... it heartened him,for it told him that he was created to walk in precarious places, not on the easy levels of life. ~ Amy Carmichael

I'm not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: "Can I get you anything?" I'll say, getting up from a dinner table, "Coffee, tea, a pony?" People rarely laugh at this, especially if they've heard it before. "This party's 'sposed to be fun," a friend will say. "Really? Will there be pony rides?" It's a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it's hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don't even realize I'm saying it. There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.

I don't even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn't? It's like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that's precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into ~ Sloane Crosley

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to believe in yourself. ~ Angel Moreira

Faith is first of all not attachment to a body of doctrines but a process of responding in obedience and trust to God's Word. God has given us the possibility of hearing the Word, since it was spoken in the humanity of Jesus, which we share, and since it continues to be spoken through the Holy Spirit, which dwells in us. So also theology is first of all not the study of doctrines, but a process of reflection on this response in faith. The classic definition of theology, "faith seeking understanding", remains always valid. Faith seeks to understand the one to whom it responds. It also, thereby, seeks to understand itself, and the implications of being so called and so gifted to respond. … Who, then, is qualified for theology? The theological task is implied by the very life of faith itself. Every Christian is therefore called to do theology in this sense. Every Christian must seek an understanding of his or her response to God and the implications of that response for the rest of life. ~ Luke Timothy Johnson

As soon as you stop making everyone else responsible for your happiness, the happier you'll be. ~ Nina Guilbeau

Frequently I will end a service of worship in our congregation by saying something like, "Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life." I'm not certain that there are such things as measures of our spirituality, but if there are, then gratitude is probably the best one. It indicates that we are paying attention. ~ M. Craig Barnes

Young girls today are very mistaken to be thinking that their sense of self-worth and their acknowledgment of their beauty depends on whether a man will give that to them or not. Such naïveté! And so what will happen when the man changes his mind about her? Tells her she's not beautiful enough? That she's not good enough? Cheats on her? Leaves her? Then what happens? She will lose all her self-worth, she will think she is not good enough, she is not beautiful enough, because all of those feelings depended on the man in the first place! And along with the loss of the man, it will all be lost as well! Mothers, teach your daughters better. It pains me to see such naive innocence right under my nose! Such naïveté does no good for any girl. It is better for a girl to be worldly-wise and have street-smarts! That's what a girl needs to have in life! Not wide-eyed delusional innocence! The sense of self-worth and acknowledgment of being beautiful must not come from a man, it must come from inside the woman herself, men will come and men will go and their coming and going must not take an effect on the woman's sense of worth and beauty. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life. ~ Charles Dickens

Whether you sweep the toilet of a school or you make cloths. Whether you take pictures of dancers or you are a full-time house wife.

Whether you are a village jester or the president of a company, never trivialize what you do. Your work, no matter how small you think it is can make a difference in someone's life. It all begins with you. It's not what you do, it's how you do it.

I have seen a traffic police bring minutes of joy and happiness to people's lives in a way that Presidents of nations cannot. Anytime you trivialize what gives you an income, you sell yourself cheap and lose your dignity. Do your work with all excitement, joy and positivity. Learn and grow from it. And if you haven't found a job to do, look for one with the same zeal as you would do the actual work. Good morning and may God bless our efforts. Emi Iyalla ~ Emi Iyalla

We all act like we know everything in life, but nobody really does. That's what I want people to realize. For me, I know that I'm the same person. Nothing has changed. My family and friends know that. ~ Alessia Cara

It often takes catching a glimpse of how our life would be without something that's valuable to us for us to realize just how valuable it is. ~ Hal Elrod

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like that. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt. ~ Will Oldham

The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place. ~ Darin Bradley

My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm, so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro. ~ Tucker Max

Sometimes we let life guide us, and other times we take life by the horns. But one thing is for sure: no matter how organized we are, or how well we plan, we can always expect the unexpected. ~ Brandon Jenner

... he risked a glance down to find her still lying on her stomach with her face pressed up against his leg as she held on for dear life.

"How are you feeling?"

There was a slight pause before she admitted, "My ass kind of hurts."

"Kind of?" he asked, trying to sound hopeful, because maybe she hadn't broken her ass after all? ~ R.L. Mathewson

Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. ~ J.G. Ballard