I have an obsession, I confess.
The last place I want to walk into with no money is a bookshop. I come out depressed if I don’t come out with a book. Reading is a basic necessity for me.
Reading is so fundamental to having more than just an ordinary passage through life yet only few have discovered it.
You are what you read! What you read forms an elemental part of your core existence. It drives your passions, forms your outlook on life and everything around you. It builds your attitude and shapes, on a rather large scale, how you turn out in future.
A person that reads stands a greater chance of achieving his deepest dreams compared to one who doesn’t. People that do not read show a certain lack of depth and seem to float through life looking for the next best thing.
To me education is a life long adventure and who says it has to be formal?
Think Personal Self development!
For as long as I can remember I have always loved reading. I hid behind books, imitated 18th century characters and envied anyone who had a library of books.
Reading is important but what you read is even more important and one needs to pay attention to what one reads.
Speech and opinions are so unexceptional and flawed these days, they come cheap. Choose what you read carefully.
There are three things I love on this side of life but only one that I don’t joke with. You can do what you please with my bags and shoes but if you do not return my book in much the same manner as I gave you, you are eternally forbidden from reading anything that has my name conspicuously signed on it.
Good books are like fresh air and I read them in search of just one life changing phrase, if I find more, then the book has to be read slowly over a good digestible period of time.
The title of the book should speak volumes to me.
The cover has to be outstanding, and the print fine.
The book MUST be new. If it isn’t I cannot buy it. If the paper is brown, the book must be a novel, else it cannot be mine. If it is torn and wrecked, I can only read it if it belongs to someone else and it is a terribly good book. If it is terribly good, I will not only read it but will get a new copy for myself.
Where has my obsession taken me? It has taken me farther than your eyes can see and deeper than your mind can search out.
It is one thing to read but another thing entirely to apply what you read in practical ways.
There are a thousand quotes on reading, let me inundate you with a few, if you please;
A library is a hospital for the mind.
~ Anonymous
I’ve traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I’ve been where no-one’s been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.
~ Anonymous
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend,
a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.
By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently
divert and pleasantly entertain himself,
as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.
~ Barrow
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision
and strengthens our most fatal tendency–
the belief that the here and now is all there is.
~ Allan Bloom
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits,
— so much help
By so much reading. it is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth —
‘T is then we get the right good from a book.” (1857)
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules,
without words or anger, without bread or money.
If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them,
they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold;
if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
~ Richard De Bury
There are worse crimes than burning books.
One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky
The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
~ Thomas Carlyle
And lastly, I cannot help but agree with Scott Corbet…
I often feel sorry for people who don’t read good books;
they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
~ Scott Corbett
And here’s my quote to help you start.
Start reading now, it’s never too late!
Start with fairy tales if you please!
