“Practice is necessary. You can't learn to swim just by reading a book about swimming. Otherwise, you will continue to look for teachers at each stop.”

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

“Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

“Buddhas and Ancestors continuously maintain ocean mudra samadhi. While swimming in this samadhi, they expound, realize, practice.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

“One's character is set at an early age. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life. I hate to see you swim out so far you can't swim back.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

“If you come to a spiritual teacher — or this book — looking for stimulating ideas, theories, beliefs, intellectual discussions, then you will be disappointed. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover and then put away. Live with it, pick it up frequently, and more importantly, put it down frequently, or spend more time holding it than reading it. Many readers will feel naturally inclined to stop reading after each entry, to pause, reflect, become still. It is always more helpful and more important to stop reading than to continue reading. Allow the book to do its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your repetitive and conditioned thinking.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

“Stop swimming around in your own mind. That is a dangerous neighborhood that you should not go into alone.”

Marc Levy (1961) French writer

“People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

“Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?”

David Baldacci book The Camel Club