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"A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, 'How could I have lived without reading it!' and also, 'What a pity I did not read it in my youth!' Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading."
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"Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own."
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Personal Development
"People easily become familiar with what you teach them practically than what you tell them verbally. Action fixes images in their minds and they can carry those images for a long period."
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Personal Development
"The greatest treasures are books."
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Personal Development
"I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t."
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Personal Development
"I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have always supposed that to be my own fault because I would not take the trouble of practicing."
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Personal Development
"Always we learn things and then we forget them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you fail at something, it means you have not mastered the art. With persistence practice, you will be master and eventually succeed."
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Personal Development
"Humanity had to expand the limits of its consciousness to learn to ask the right questions."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless."
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Personal Development
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"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
Learning
"I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology."
Education
"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased."
Language
"And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine."
Journey
"Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
Exploration
"You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book."
Anticipation
"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts."
Houses
"Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did."
Grief
"They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now."
Self
"What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial."
Philosophy
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