Quotes about books
page 55

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Appendix
1980s, At Home (1988)

God, Religion, People, World

“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”

Arno Allan Penzias (1933) American physicist

New York Times, March 12, 1978, as cited in Bergman 1994, 183.

“If you only ever read one book in your life I highly recommend… keeping your f***ing mouth shut.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

sic
Cut It Out (2004)

Life, Reading

“As interpolation instead of interpretation was not then so common or so honourable as at present, I believed that a part of my work was well done. How was I to expect that, because I ascribed piety to Spinoza, I would myself be taken for a Spinozist? Yet I had never defended his system, and anything philosophic that was in my book was manifestly inconsistent with the characteristics of his views and had quite a different basis than the unity of substance.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) [original in German]
S - Z

Parting

“Without a doubt, the Theologico-Politicus Theological-Political Treatise is one of the most important and influential books in the history of philosophy, in religious and political thought, and even in Bible studies. More than any other work, it laid the foundation for modern critical and historical approaches to the Bible. And while often overlooked in books on the history of political thought, the Treatise also has a proud and well-deserved place in the rise of democratic theory, civil liberties, and politcal liberalism.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)
M - R, Steven Nadler

Study, History

“For many years I did not dare look into a Latin author or at anything which evoked an image of Italy. If this happened by chance, I suffered agonies. Herder often used to say mockingly that I had learned all my Latin from Spinoza, for that was the only Latin book he had ever seen me reading. He did not realize how carefully I had to guard myself against the classics, and that it was sheer anxiety which drove me to take refuge in the abstractions of Spinoza.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: Schon einige Jahre her durft' ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute. Geschah es zufällig, so erduldete ich die entsetzlichsten Schmerzen. Herder spottete oft über mich, daß ich all mein Latein aus dem Spinoza lerne, denn er hatte bemerkt, daß dies das einzige lateinische Buch war, das ich las; er wußte aber nicht, wie sehr ich mich vor den Alten hüten mußte, wie ich mich in jene abstrusen Allgemeinheiten nur ängstlich flüchtete.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, 1786–88. Translated from the German by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)
G - L, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Chance, Reading, Suffering, Learning

“You know that I do not share your opinion in this matter. That Spinozism and Atheism are to me two different things. That when I read Spinoza I can only explain him by reference to himself and that if it came to naming a book which, of all that I know, most agrees with my way of seeing things, then I would have to name the Ethics—even though by nature I do not share his way of seeing things.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: Du weißt daß ich über die Sache selbst nicht deiner Meinung bin. Daß mir Spinozismus und Atheismus zweyerlei ist. Daß ich den Spinoza wenn ich ihn lese mir nur aus sich selbst erklären kann, und daß ich, ohne seine Vorstellungsart von Natur selbst zu haben, doch wenn die Rede wäre ein Buch anzugeben, das unter allen die ich kenne, am meisten mit der meinigen übereinkommt, die Ethik nennen müsste.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in one of his letters to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 1785
G - L, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Way, Reading, Nature

“How did he get away with pushing a book like this? How is it anyone ever believed him?”

David Brin book The Postman

Gordon shrugged. “It was called ‘the Big Lie’ technique, Johnny. Just sound like you know what you’re talking about—as if you’re reciting facts. Talk very fast. Weave your lies into the shape of a conspiracy theory and repeat your assertions over and over again. Those who want an excuse to hate or blame—those with big but weak egos—will leap at a simple, neat explanation for the way the world is. Those types will never call you on the facts.”
Source: The Postman (1985), Section 3, “Cincinnatus”, Chapter 13 (p. 255)

“Foolish, ignorant and vicious persons go to books for their thoughts and judgments, and for all their elevated and noble sentiments, just as a rich woman goes with her money to a draper.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Les sots, les ignorans, les gens malhonnêtes, vont prendre dans les livres des idées, de la raison, des sentimens nobles et élevés, comme une femme riche va chez un marchand d'étoffes s'assortir pour son argent.
Maximes et Pensées, #572
Maxims and Considerations

Money, Personality

“In general, the books of RV level I (RV 4-6) are thoroughly South Asian and have reference to local climate, trees and animals. We therefore have to take them seriously at their word, and cannot claim that they belong just to Afghanistan.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

WITZEL 2000: The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000. (WITZEL 2000a:§13). Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Animals, Tree

“The true Christian knows no Covenant or Mediation with God, but only the Old, Eternal, and Unchangeable Relation, that in Him we live, and move, and have our being; and he asks not who has said this, but only what has been said;—even the book wherein this may be written is nothing to him as a proof, but only as a means of culture; he bears the proof in his own breast. This is my view of the matter…”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 105

God, Relation ships

“Professor writes about the brain in a very approachable way, and from what he writes, the conviction that man is free is born. The message of his books influenced, among others, the emergence of several of my painting cycles. For me he is an authority, and I do not have many of them.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Iwona Siwek-Front, painter, friend of Vetulani in an interview Artystka, to jak glebogryzarka http://www.bloge12.pl/artystka-to-jak-glebogryzarka/ (in Polish), Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury, 2014.

Way, Painting

“A treatise on mental dietetics would be imperfect without some special notice of that most irrational and melancholy of all human torments, hypochondriasis. Reason, morality, wit, and even religion, have endeavoured by every possible means to exorcise this demon. By pamphlets and by books—in tragedy and in comedy — from the pulpit and on the stage, it has been denounced and ridiculed.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

Source: The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838), p. 125

Religion

“The subject-matter of this book is sadhana. There are not many books like this on this subject showing such mastery and insight. Sri Anirvan lived a life of dedication and reflection and he speaks as an insider. He takes his readers onto unfamiliar grounds and there is no doubt that they will find in him a sure guide on this unusual pilgrimage.”

Anirvan (1896–1978) Indian Hindu philosopher

Inner yoga (antaryoga): Anirvan. (1988). New Delhi: Voice of India. From the Introduction by Ram Swarup.

Life

“The materials in these still standard books never betray the author’s original purpose in amassing them: to demonstrate that Christianity is rationally superior to Hinduism.”

John Muir (indologist) (1810–1882) Scottish Sanskrit scholar and Indologist

R.F.Young, quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 10. ISBN 9788185990354 https://web.archive.org/web/20120501043412/http://voiceofdharma.org/books/hhce/ About John Muir

“There is no denying the fact that Ziyauddin had his prejudices, his weaknesses and his handicaps…. But after all these decuctions have been made, the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi remains the greatest book that has survived to us from the Sultanate period. Its eminence in this respect is unchallengable; and so long as the history of India is studied, Barani cannot be ignored…”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

K.S. Lal, Studies in Medieval Indian History, 1966

Study, History

“I read a few books like Skinny Bitch, a bunch of books on vegan lifestyles and my mother always brought me to vegetarian restaurants, so I was really into diets and studying health. And I just thought it would be the best step, so I went vegetarian. … I watched a lot of PETA videos on YouTube, and it was heartbreaking.”

Jenna Talackova (1988) Canadian model

Unveiling her PETA ad on Davie Street; as quoted in "Jenna Talackova unveils racy PETA ad and promotes vegan diet" https://www.vancouverobserver.com/city/jenna-talackova-unveils-racy-peta-ad-and-promotes-vegan-diet, The Vancouver Observer (24 January 2014).

Study, Reading, Bitch, Health

“Dharampal, the noted Gandhian, used British data during the colonial period to show that in the ninetheenth century, the shudras comprised a larger student body than any other community did. … Besides the large number of schools at that time, there were also approximately a hundred institutions of higher learning in each district of Bengal and Bihar. Unfortunately, these numbers rapidly dwindled all across India during the nineteenth century under British rule. The British also noted that Sanskrit books were being widely used to teach grammar, lexicology, mathematics, medical science, logic, law and philosophy. …. Furthermore, in the early British period in India, British officials noted that education for the masses was more advanced and widespread in India than it was in England. …. According to Dharampal, the British later replaced this Sanskrit-based system with their own English-based one, the goal being to produce low-level clerks for the British administration.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit

School, Time, Law, Learning

“Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts—and even pretend to revere them—the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.
Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 2: "The curse of the sun", p. 25 (original emphasis)

Imagination, Learning, Cheating

“This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies.”

James C. Collins book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

What is a visionary company? Visionary companies are premier institutions -- the crown jewels -- in their industries, widely admired by their peers and having a long track record of making a significant impact on the world around them. The key point is that a visionary company is an organization -- an institution. All individual leaders, no matter how charismatic or visionary, eventually die; and all visionary products and services -- all "great ideas" -- eventually become obsolete. Indeed, entire markets can become obsolete and disappear. Yet visionary companies prosper over long periods of time, through multiple product life cycles and multiple generations of active leaders.
Book abstract, as cited in: Joe Kelly, ‎Louise Kelly (1998), An Existential-systems Approach to Managing Organizations. p. 256
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 1994

“The essential complement to the path-breaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Competitive Advantage, 1985

“Professor Lal was already a veteran whose major book, History of the Khaljis, was compulsory reading for students of medieval Indian history from the undergraduate class onwards. I still find it very useful when I teach any course on the Delhi sultanate. … Historiographically the book fell entirely and conspicuously in the genre of nationalist historiography whose hallmark was its challenge· to the portrayal of medieval Indian history as a story of unrelenting conflict between the medieval Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects. History of the Khaljis is one of the best works in this genre: empirically sound, objective in its assessment of events and persons, non-judgemental in its evaluation of the motives of rulers or their opponents. The remarkable quality gave the book a long life in the discipline, even when newer problematiques of socio-economic history began to displace the ones of dynastic history that had remained the preoccupation of the earlier generation.”

K. S. Lal (1920–2002) Indian historian

Harbans Mukhia, Obituary, The Indian Historical Review http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/037698360102800245

Reading, History, Personality, Motivation

“Khamenei is not the first ruler of Iran with whom poets have run into trouble. For some 12 centuries poetry has been the Iranian people’s principal medium of expression. Iran may be the only country where not a single home is found without at least one book of poems. Initially, Persian poets had a hard time to define their place in society. The newly converted Islamic rulers suspected the poets of trying to revive the Zoroastrian faith to undermine the new religion. Clerics saw poets as people who wished to keep the Persian language alive and thus sabotage the ascent of Arabic as the new lingua franca.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Without the early Persian poets, Iranians might have ended up like so many other nations in the Middle East who lost their native languages and became Arabic speakers. Early on, Persian poets developed a strategy to check the ardor of the rulers and the mullahs. They started every qasida with praise to God and Prophet followed by panegyric for the ruler of the day. Once those “obligations” were out of the way they would move on to the real themes of the poems they wished to compose. Everyone knew that there was some trick involved but everyone accepted the result because it was good. Despite that modus vivendi some poets did end up in prison or in exile while many others spent their lives in hardship if not poverty. However, poets were never put to the sword. The Khomeinist regime is the first in Iran’s history to have executed so many poets. Implicitly or explicitly, some rulers made it clear what the poet couldn’t write. But none ever dreamt of telling the poet what he should write. Khamenei is the first to try to dictate to poets, accusing them of “crime” and” betrayal” if they ignored his injunctions. When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

Home, Faith, Religion, Time

“Ten years ago, alongside the return of the Book of Deer, I was arguing strongly for the return of the Lewis chessmen to Scotland. Sadly this campaign is as yet incomplete. Of the ninety-three pieces known to us today, the National Museum of Scotland holds only eleven. The other eighty-two remain in the British Museum in London. I still find it utterly unacceptable that the Lewis chessmen are scattered around Britain in a bizarre parody of the Barnett Formula. And you can be assured that I will continue campaigning for a united set of Lewis chessmen in an independent Scotland!”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

“Jixiao Xinshu (New Book Recording Effective Techniques) exists in two editions, the first (c.”

Qi Jiguang book Ji Xiao Xin Shu

1560) had 18 chapters, and the later addition (1584), re-edited with new material had 14.
Jixiao Xinshu (1560; 1584)

“When Mian (Dr. Hussain) reached the Rashtrapathi Bhavan after taking oath as President of India, he said that only three rooms out of its 340 sprawling rooms would suffice for his family…when we moved there were my mother, my daughter, Neelofer, some domestic servants, two cows, a parrot and about five thousand books and other household items. Of the three rooms, one was exclusively for him while my mother, my daughter and I stayed in the other room and the third room was used for meeting visitors and for taking food.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

His daughter when he became President and moved to live in the Rashtrapathi Bhavan, in: p. 339.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)

Family, Daughters, Food

“I am amazed that Roli Books should publish such thinly disguised plagiarism, and allow the author to hide in a cavalier manner behind a nom-de-plume.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

The book is clearly modelled on my career, even down to the name of the main character. That character's journalism is abysmal, and his views on Hindutva and Hinduism do not in any way reflect mine. I would disagree with them profoundly. On the controversy created in a thinly-disguised novel which portrays him as a heartless philanderer and supporter of fanatics. Source: Dean Nelson, " Former BBC correspondent Sir Mark Tully attacked in novel http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7552715/Former-BBC-correspondent-Sir-Mark-Tully-attacked-in-novel.html," in The Telegraph, 5 April 2010

“Swati Tirunal, now thirteen… took up a book of mathematics and selecting the forty seventh proposition of Euclid sketched the figure on a country slate but what astonished me most was his telling us in English that Geometry was derived from the Sanskrit, which as Jaw metor (Jyamiti) to measure the earth and that many of our mathematical terms were also derived from the same source such as hexagon, heptagon, octagon… This promising boy is now, I conclude, sovereign of the finest country in India for he was to succeed to the Musnud (throne) the moment he had attained his 16th year.”

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma (1813–1846) Maharajah of Travencore

Colonel Welsh, in "The Monarch musician"
About Swathi Thirunal

Mathematics, Boy, Country

“Tulsidas is the highest tree in the garden of Hindu poetry, though his name does not appear in Aeen-i-Akbari or any book of Muslim historians or even narratives of European writers who worked on information taken from Persian historians. Yet, Tuslidas was the greatest man of India of his time. In fact he can be called greater than Akbar because the victory that the poet registered in the hearts of thousands of millions of people was greater and more lasting than all the imperious victories put together…the Ramacharritamanas is such an enormous epic that its English adaptation by Growse is of 362 pages. The declinations in this epic are so similar to Christianity that on numerous spots, if Rama is replaced by Christ, there can be no question.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Vincent Smith in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", pp.34-35
On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas

Tree, Time, Question, Victory

“Tulsidas wrote 12 books, but, by far, the most important is the Ramacharitamanas (the holy Lakes of the Acts of Ram), a Ramayana written in old Hindi (Avadhi) couplets. The book was written under the direction of Hanuman himself. It is read all over North India, and particularly during the time of the Ramlila. It is sung aloud in large groups for devotional purposes.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Constance Jones & James D. Ryan in "Encyclopedia of Hinduism", p. 457
On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas

Reading, Time

“Physics by its very nature requires extreme specialization on the part of its students. Its conclusions, which must eventually predict numbers for the results of actual measurements, are best expressed in mathematical formulae. This has the disadvantage of making the subject well-nigh unintelligible to the layman. There are unfortunately few teachers who are able to surmount this handicap. Professor Raman has written a book which avoids this pitfall and thus should give the lay reader an opportunity of penetrating at least part of the way into the mysteries of this interesting and important science.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Francis Low, a distinguished theoretical physicist then working at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, wrote in the introduction to this book quoted in Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern Indian Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

Nature, Teachers, Mathematics, Way

“Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 91.

Pain, Waiting, Bad luck, Suffering

“For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T. V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 24.

Pain, Time, Night, Law

“The above praise-song appeared on the back cover of the biography in question; and, since capitalist publishers treat books just like boxes of soap powder, one has admittedly to be suspicious of any advertisement designed to sell the book.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 200.

Appearance, Box, Question

“Interview: Robert Heller: Alistair Schofield speaks to Robert Heller, journalist, commentator and the author of more than 50 books on management and business strategy.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

2006
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/int_heller/interview_robert_heller.html online
Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

Business

“Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg’s Myth.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Not because his writings were exceptionally profound, difficult to comprehend or emotionally overwhelming, but because Clemens hammered on my head with the book for minutes on end. (Clemens and Weser were the principal torturers of the Jews in Dresden, and they were generally differentiated as the Hitter and the Spitter.) ‘How dare a Jewish pig like you presume to read a book of this kind?’ Clemens yelled. To him it seemed like the desecration of a consecrated wafer. ‘How dare you have a book here from the lending library?’ Only the fact that the volume had demonstrably been borrowed in the name of my Aryan wife, and, moreover, that the sheet of notes which accompanied it was torn up without being deciphered, saved me at the time from the concentration camp.
Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 12.

Life

“Craft is something you learn by studying models. When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz

Study, Learning

“Full of spirit, wit and good sense and as free of humbug as the man himself, The Freethinker’s Prayer Book by Khushwant Singh, is a book of inspiration, comfort and entertainment for every discerning reader.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

Quoted in The Freethinker’s Prayer Book by Khushwant Singh – Advance Book Review, 21 December 2013, Latest Book Reviews Net http://latestbookreviews.net/the-freethinkers-prayer-book-by-khushwant-singh-book-review-release-date/,

Sense

“Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.”

Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) Journalist, children's writer

H. L. Mencken, The Sahara of the Bozart.

Time

“Change and growth cannot be halted, time must run on. That is the whole moral of the three books.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Colin Greenland, Beowulf to Kafka: Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, reprinted in the omnibus edition The Gormenghast Novels published by The Overlook Press, p. 1141

Time, Change

“You are the first person who has been able to illustrate the book adequately since Tenniel, though I still argue as I think I argued with you years ago that your Alice is a little bit too much of a gamin.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Graham Greene, quoted in Bandersnatch, 151, July 2011, p. 8

Personality, Thinking

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this. Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

Game, Bad luck

“The book of the Bible which most obviously resembles the Taoist classics is Ecclesiastes.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

But at the same time there is much in the teaching of the Gospels on simplicity, childlikeness, and humility, which responds to the deepest aspirations of the Chuang Tzu book and the Tao Teh Ching.
"A Note To The Reader".
The Way of Chuang-Tzŭ (1965)

“I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

Among other things, the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in American history.
[David, Horowitz, http://townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/2009/05/04/the_threat_at_home, "The Threat at Home", townhall.com, July 31, 2006, 2014-21-06]
2009

Universe

“I think a significant number of people are not happy with the way things are; I’m not, and I’ve done alright out of this system—I’ve got a big house, a nice cat, and when I write books, they’re immediately put on the school curriculum. So this system has not been bad to me. I’ve been given everything that I wanted. The problem is, I didn’t really want it, that desire was put there. Who put it there? And why?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

School, Housing, Bad luck, People

“When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel. I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters. My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, it’s that I’m worse. Not that I’m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind? Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberated from the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind. Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Confidence, Reading, Making love, Understanding

“His book has the force of a mob-protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. The wheel turns and turns and it does not matter, one hardly notices that the captain of the company, killed on page 159, is alive again a hundred pages later. It does not matter that every stock situation of the war, suicide, the murder of an officer, the slaughter of prisoners, a vision of Christ, is apportioned to Company K, because the book is not written in any realistic convention. It is the only War-book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose.”

William March (1893–1954) United States Marine, novelist, short story writer

In a Graham Greene review of the novel Company K for the newspaper The Spectator.

Reading, War, Christ, Suicide

“About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism… But it was tremendous – something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings.”

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Speech delivered at Barisal on 14th October 1917. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
About others

Reading, Nature, Love, Making love

“Carr states that the characters of the Brunhilde are not true archetypes. Why, then they are false archetypes, and these also have their being. Kidd believes that X himself is in the process of becoming the Third Evil to fill the void left by the insufficiency of Papadiabolous and Seaworthy in the roles of devils. But Kidd is Joycean. To complicate matters, Lafferty swears that Finnegan is in no way Joycean, that he is nine hundred years earlier, out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Tain Bo Cuailinge), a character out of the Tain.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

This presupposes that Finnegan is identical with Fion McCool as well as with the more derivative Fingal, and also with Cu Chulainn. Well, Finnegan is capable of being all. To those interested in this line I recommend Thurneysen’s Die Irische Helden- und Konigsage.
Interglossia
The Devil is Dead (1971)

Way, Falseness, Evil

“In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt—a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or—more generally—by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you—guilty.
“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 169
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“You remember that book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?”

Mohamed ElBaradei (1942) Egyptian law scholar and diplomat, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Nobel …

… Well that's very much true. I find a lot in common in the way I manage things and the way she manages three-year olds. We humans are the same when we are three years old and when we are 50!
Comparing his work as an international diplomat to that of his wife, Aida Elkachef, a kindergarten teacher, with a mention of the book by Robert Fulghum.
Breaking the Cycle (2003)

Learning

“In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age (2004)

Imagination, Literature, Age, World

“If you want to see what’s wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and she cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It’s a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding. She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She’s full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 262

Reading, Beauty, Intelligence, Wolf

“America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.
Letter to William D. Ticknor (9 January 1855)

Chance, Women, Success

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

Time, Grass, People, Nature

“Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to.
Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)

“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Imagination, Dead, Men

“Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Universe

“The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot.”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’
Flew's review of The God Delusion

God

“If you merely read this book you will not reach the Way of strategy. Absorb the things written in this book. Do not just read, memorise or imitate, but so that you realise the principle from within your own heart study hard to absorb these things into your body.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Study, Reading, Heart, Way

“His religious requirements—that the service come from Cranmer’s rites in the old prayer book, that it take 33 minutes or less, that the church be within 10 minutes’ driving distance and that the altar be sufficiently simple so that it wouldn’t remind him of a gift shop—limited his choice of parishes.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

“A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from I have Nothing to Admit

Money

“Religion, it stops people from thinking because they think all the answers are in that one book; it impedes progress; it justifies crazy people.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.
I'm Swiss (2005)

Religion, Thinking, People

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

[…] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Literature

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Reading, Bad luck, People, Weather

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point … I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace (everyday) face; carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Charlotte Brontë, quote in Original Penguin Classics Introduction to Pride and Prejudice. by Taner, Tony (1972). 80 Strand, London, WC2R, England: Penguin Books, Ltd. ISBN 0-141-43951-3.

Housing, Reading, Country, Flowers

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured.... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches.... and shall master all attachment.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

School, Family, God, Soul

“In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Reading, Past, Animals, Memory

“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … what you will.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter One

God, Time, Beauty, Art

“It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Source: Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 144

Learning, People, Reading

“Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Fallen Leaves (2014)

School, Behavior, Reading, Learning

“The Holy Spirit through blessed John the evangelist makes a terrible threat against those who add anything to or take anything from divine scripture when he says in the last chapter of Revelations [22:18–9], "If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues which are in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book."”

William of Ockham (1285–1349) medieval philosopher and theologian

We clearly gather from all these that nothing should be added to sacred scripture nor anything removed from it. To decide by way of teaching, therefore, which assertion should be considered catholic, which heretical, chiefly pertains to theologians, the experts on divine scripture.
You see that I have set out opposing assertions in response to your question and I have touched on quite strong arguments in support of each position. Therefore consider now which seems the more probable to you.
Vol. I, Book 1, Ch. 2.
Dialogus (1494)

God, Life, Making love, Parting

“I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god, and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good””

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

that's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)

God, Hell, Religion, Reading

“I have been reading Miss Austen's Emma, which I had entirely forgotten, with the greatest enjoyment. I think it an admirable book, & I dare say you will agree with me. Miss Austen is an inimitable painter of quiet life. It would be difficult to say where the interest of Emma lies, yet it does interest strongly. There is no fine writing; no laboured description; no imaginative or ideal touches; no working on the feelings. Its magic must be its truth. It is exquisitely true. Life is presented to us, not as it may be taken in rare situations, in picturesque emergencies, but as we see it everyday. Common, workday life, with here & there a suit of best for Sundays. Yet there is nothing trivial. It is what Alfred calls in one of his unfinished poems "most ideal unideal, most uncommon commonplace."”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Dignity in the sentiments, dignity in the style. Quite a woman's book — (don't frown, Miss Fytche — I mean it for compliment) — none but a woman & a lady could possess that tact of minute observation, & that delicacy of sarcasm.
Arthur Henry Hallam, letter to fiancé Emily (Emilia) Tennyson (1833-01-25), Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945, by Katie Halsey (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)

Imagination, Reading, Truth, Thinking

“This title comes from a phrase from his 1938 essay "What I Believe" which is the first essay in the book.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.”

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court

Writing for the court, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969)

Housing, Reading, Business, Men

“I am for no law to be passed to prevent Keith Ellison or anyone else from bringing any book he wants to his swearing-in, whether actual or ceremonial. But neither I nor tens of millions of other Americans will watch in silence as the Bible is replaced with another religious text for the first time since George Washington brought a Bible to his swearing-in”

Dennis Prager (1948) American writer, speaker, radio and TV commentator, theologian

2000s

Silence, Law, Time

“I was merely thinking God's thoughts after Him. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.”

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer

Google search of the second sentence, in quotes, yields a trio of 2019 books alone, most (there and in following) attributing it to Kepler—e.g., see Prof Basden's 2019 work, [Foundations and Practice of Research: Adventures with Dooyeweerd's Philosophy, The Complex Activity of Research [§10—4.1 Less-Obvious Pistic Functioning in Research], Advances in Research Methods, Abingdon-on-Thames, UK, Taylor & Francis-Routledge, 1st, 9781138720688, https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Practice-Research-Adventures-Dooyeweerds/dp/1138720682, February 25, 2020] (page 222). While most citations of Kepler have been traced back to a translation of an original work, this quotation appears broadly without any such sourcing (e.g., Basden). Where it is sourced, the sources are either spurious (e.g., to the "New World Encyclopedia", a Paragon House/Unification Church product https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/02/arts/unification-church-is-starting-a-publishing-house.html, wherein it is likewise unsourced), or to such sources as Henry Morris' 1988 creationist work, [Men of Science, Men of God: Great Scientists Who Believed the Bible, Green Forest, AR, Master Books, 21st reprint, 9780890510803, https://www.amazon.com/Men-Science-God-Henry-Morris/dp/0890510806, February 25, 2020] (page 21f). Until a scholarly source is found that ties these statements to an original text from Kepler, they formally must be considered unattributed to Kepler. Disputed quotes

God, Thinking, Nature

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”

Johannes Kepler book Mysterium Cosmographicum

Book V, Introduction
Variant translation: It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
As quoted in The Martyrs of Science; or, the Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler (1841) by David Brewster, p. 197. This has sometimes been misquoted as "It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
Variant translation: I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony... I write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God has also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.
As quoted in Calculus. Multivariable (2006) by Steven G. Krantz and Brian E. Blank. p. 126
Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Harmonices Mundi (1618)

Forgiveness, God, Waiting, Reading

“Me personally and professionally, I haven't been that outspoken about race and class, partly because it's in my work, but in part because I don't want to get hate mail. I'm sick of trying to talk to people. I don't think you can change people. I think people have to be forced to do the right thing, so I'm not interested in trying to change people's opinion. I can illuminate, and you can see if you like. And if you can't see it, then just go buy the next book. But I'm sorry, I'm no longer interested in trying to be nice about what is right, because that doesn't work.”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On letting his work speak regarding race and class in “James McBride Says Fiction Writing Allows Him More Freedom” https://www.npr.org/2017/10/01/554933082/james-mcbride-says-fiction-writing-allows-him-more-freedom in NPR (2017 Oct 1)

Hate, Personality, People, Thinking

“The pride comes from accomplishment. I have done what I wanted to do more than any other thing in life. I have become a writer, published two books of integrity and worth. I did not know what those two books would cost me, how very difficult it would be to write them, to survive the opposition to them.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

"A Battered Wife Survives", (1978)
Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987

Life

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 6 (p. 77)

Life

“Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 2 “Four Subjective Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes)” (p. 64)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

“Synthesizing as it does the philosophical accomplishments of fifteen centuries, this book appears as the final achievement of ancient philosophy.”

John Scotus Eriugena (810–877) Irish theologian

George Bosworth Burch Early Medieval Philosophy (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951) p. 5.

Of De Divisione Naturae.
Criticism

Appearance

“Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.”

China Miéville book The 9th Technique

The 9th Technique (p. 102)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

Making love

“On closing this book, if I was to leave you with only one thought, it would be this: My life story could only happen in America. Look at my life: Here was a guy with very little observable potential- nothing much behind him except a couple loving parents. But because of the way this country functions I was able to make my way through and have a very good life. I don't think I had any special talent or ability. Anybody could do what I did if he wanted to. I've never resented anybody ho has something I didn't have, because I knew that in this country if I worked hard enough I could have it, too. The system in America allows for and welcomes success. That's worth fighting for if someone threatens to take it away. You can have anything or be anything you want in this country if you put your mind to it. Don't let anybody take that away from you.”

Lynn Compton (1921–2012) Easy Company soldier turned noted jurist

Source: Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers (2008), p. 254

Love, Success, Country, Thinking

“We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73

Reading, Literature, Love, Making love

“[M]athematics is not a popular subject... The reason for this is to be found in the common superstition that [it] is but a continuation... of the fine art of arithmetic, of juggling with numbers. [We] combat that superstition, by offering, instead of formulas, figures that may be looked at and that may easily be supplemented by models which the reader may construct. This book... bring[s] about a greater enjoyment of mathematics, by making it easier... to penetrate the essence of mathematics without... a laborious course of studies.”

David Hilbert Geometry and the Imagination

Preface
Geometry and the Imagination (1952)

Study, Art, Mathematics, Making love

“The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished, as most notably in the period with which this book is concerned. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation.”

Raymond Williams book Culture and Society

Culture and Society (1958) p. 280

Appearance, Change

“DESOLATE are the mansions of the fair, the stations in Minia, where they rested, and those where they fixed their abodes! Wild are the hills of Goul, and deserted is the summit of Rijaam.
The canals of Rayaan are destroyed: the remains of them are laid bare and smoothed by the floods, like characters engraved on the solid rocks.
Dear ruins! Many a year has been closed, many a month, holy and unhallowed, has elapsed, since I exchanged tender vows with their fair inhabitants!
The rainy constellations of spring have made their hills green and luxuriant: the drops from the thunder-clouds have drenched them with profuse as well as with gentle showers:
Showers, from every nightly cloud, from every cloud veiling the horizon at day-break, and from every evening cloud, responsive with hoarse murmurs.
Here the wild eringo-plants raise their tops: here the antelopes bring forth their young, by the sides of the valley: and here the ostriches drop their eggs.
The large-eyed wild-cows lie suckling their young, a few days old—their young, who will soon become a herd on the plain.
The torrents have cleared the rubbish, and disclosed the traces of habitations, as the reeds of a writer restore effaced letters in a book;
Or as the black dust, sprinkled over the varied marks on a fair hand, brings to view with a brighter tint the blue stains of woad.
I stood asking news of the ruins concerning their lovely habitants; but what avail my questions to dreary rocks, who answer them only by their echo?”

Labīd (560–661) Sahabah and poet

Translated by C. J. Lyall, quoted in Arabian Poetry, p. 41-42. First Stanza, lines 1-10 https://archive.org/details/arabianpoetryfo00clougoog/page/n127/mode/2up The Poem of Labīd (translated by C. J. Lyall in 1881)

Question, Spring, Lie, Love

“[I]n this book... the rallies... are different... they build from day to day... and... it's led by people who are full-time... and they open offices in Washington. ...Three enlightened billionaires come to town and they say... "Hey, let's fund this"... and a brain trust.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

"How The Rats Reformed The Congress" (2018)

People, Time

“You would think that the obvious irreligious objection would come to almost anyone’s mind when reading a religious tome or holy book. What if you don’t believe the holy book’s presuppositions and narrative claims and simply ask for independent argument or evidence for God’s existence? What if you’re not persuaded by the argument that God exists because His assertion that He exists and discussion of His various exploits appear in this book about Him that believers say He inspired?”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 2 “Four Subjective Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes)” (p. 63)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

God, Reading, Thinking, Appearance

“I have been given a responsibility and I have accepted it. Verily I am a follower (of the Sunnah and not an innovator. I promise you that in addition to following the Book of Allah (Quran) and the Sunnah of His Prophet (Muhammad), I will do three other things: following the example of those who came before me with regard to what you have agreed upon and decided, and what is decided by good people openly, and not interfering with you except when a hadd punishment is required. This world is tempting and it makes itself attractive to people, so that many people, so that many people are inclined towards it. Do not be content with this world and do not put your trust in it, for it is not trustworthy. Understand that these wordly temptations will not go away unless you ignore them.”

Uthman (574–656) Companion of Muhammad and third Rashidun Caliph

History of the Prophets and Kings, Vol. 5, p. 443

Understanding, People, World, Making love

“It’s a very bourgeois industry. There’s resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. ‘A film can be feminist?’ They don’t know this concept. They don’t read the book. They don’t even know about the fact that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.”

Céline Sciamma (1978) French director and screenwriter

On the tepid reception of her film Portrait of a Lady on Fire in France in “Céline Sciamma: 'In France, they don’t find the film hot. They think it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic'” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/21/celine-sciamma-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire in The Guardian (2020 Feb 21)

Reading, Country, Strong, Youth

“O people, you were not created in vain, nor will you be left to yourselves. Rather, you will return to a place in which Allah will descend in order to judge among you and distinguish between you. Destitute and lost are those who forsake the all-encompassing Mercy of Allah, and they will be excluded from Paradise, the borders of which are as wide as the heavens and the Earth. Don't you know that protection, tomorrow, will be limited to those who feared Allah [today], and to those who sold something ephemeral for something permanent, something small for something great, and fear for protection? Don't you realize that you are the descendants of those who have perished, that those who remain will take place after you, and that this will continue until you are all returned to Allah? Every day you dispatch to Allah, at all times of the day, someone who has ded, his term having come to an end. You bury him in a crack in the earth and then leave him without a pillow or a bed. He has parted from his loved ones, severed his connections with the living, and taken up residence in the earth, whereupon he comes face to face with the accounting. He is mortgaged to his deeds: He needs his accomplishments, but not the material things he left on earth. Therefore, fear Allah before death descends and its appointed times expire. I swear by Allah that I say those words to you knowing that I myself have committed more sins than any of you; I therefore ask Allah for forgiveness and I repent. Whenever we learn that one of you needs something, I try to satisfy his need to the extent that I am able. Whenever I can provide satisfaction to one of you out of you of my possessions, I seek to treat him as my equal and m relative, so that my life and his life are of equal value. I swear by Allah that had I wanted something else, namely, affluence, then it would have been easy for me to utter the word, aware as I am of the means for obtaining this. But Allah has issued in an eloquent Book (Quran) and a just example Sunnah by means of which He guides us to obedience and proscribes disobedience.”

Umar II (681–720) Umayyad caliph

History of the Prophets and Kings, Vol. 24, p. 98/99, also quoted in Umar Bin Abd Al-Aziz, p. 708-710
Last Sermon delivered to People

Forgiveness, Life, Time, Death

“To my mind, the Agni Yoga teachings constitute one of the major attempts of Hierarchy to prepare humanity for the new age. They are entirely relevant to the present----and future time. The first book of the series, The Call, was given by Maitreya Himself, and was intended to alert disciples to the fact of His imminent return. The Master Morya, as I have said elsewhere, is one of the first group of Masters to be seen by humanity, and is the stimulus behind the occult groups of all kinds. His immediate task is to regenerate and purify the teaching of these groups... [The Agni Yoga Teachings were given] by mental telepathy through Helena Roerich (a disciple of the Master Morya) in Russian... My information is that The Call is His [Maitreya's] sole personal contribution to the Agni Yoga series.. The Call is also titled: Leaves of Morya’s Garden, I.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. I (1986), p. 300/1

Time, Personality, Future, Age

“If the streambed of education is being enlarged, one formidable force altering its contours is competition. Learning is where you find it: on "Sesame Street," in inner games of tennis and the Zen of everything, in teaching and learning cooperatives, in computers, on FM radio, in self-help books, in magazines... and television documentaries.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Game, Help, Learning, Self-confidence

“After coming home, I listened to the radio and cleaned up a little. A woman on All Things Considered wrote a book of advice called If You Want to Write and mentioned the importance of keeping a diary. It was valuable, she said, because after a while you'd stop being forced and pretentious and become honest and unafraid of your thoughts.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

01.07.1983 - p.94
Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume 1 (1977-2002) (2017)

Home

“I feel queasy about the idea of having non-Asians taking center stage in one of my books. I would feel guilty about it, as if I were trying to deny my ethnic heritage, even though this is precisely what I am suggesting we should be free to do.”

Don Lee (author) (1959) American writer

On the writing dilemmas that he faces in “Don Lee: The Ethnic Literature Box” https://www.guernicamag.com/don-lee-the-ethnic-literature-box/ in Guernica Magazine (2012 Jun 25)

Idea, Feeling

“I have 5,000 books in my home, 1,000 of which I feel are close to my heart. They have always shown me the way. Books are my great passion; I could not live without them.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: A Day In the Life of Brunello Cucinelli https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a17874/brunello-cucinelli-profile/ Harper's Bazaar, Lauren McCarthy, 15 September 2016

Home, Heart, Passion, Way

Quotes about books page 55

Quotes about books
page 55