Quotes
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To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Norwegian Wood
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight
I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting
The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays