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"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
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"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
"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 life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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Personal Development
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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Personal Development
"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read."
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"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both."
Power
"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."
Power
"There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight."
Truth
"Lying can never save us from another lie."
Lie
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."
Absurdity
"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."
Time
"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought."
Experience
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Hope
"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."
Life
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
Success
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