“But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.”

“I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.”

Primo Levi (1918–1987) Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist

“It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.”

Jean Webster book Daddy-Long-Legs

“I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.”

John Varley book The Ophiuchi Hotline

“One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life….”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

“Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

“We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

“Whether or not the soul is immortal is a fact in nature and cannot be changed by any book whatever. If I am immortal, I am. If am not, no book can render me so. It is no more wonderful that I should live again than that I do live.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

“Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy