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"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
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"He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind."
Learning
"When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force."
Politics
"When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer."
Ethics
"But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you.""Me what?""Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that."
Existence
"She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth."
Emotion
"The source of work? Man's mind...man's reasoning mind."
Productivity
"In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art."
Art
"Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others."
Integrity
"They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication."
Reality
"Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration."
Memory
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"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."
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Personal Development
"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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Personal Development
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
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Personal Development
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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Personal Development
"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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Personal Development
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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Personal Development
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."
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Personal Development
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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Personal Development
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