Tao Te Ching
Books
Books and our eyes are like flint and steel creating tiny sparks that can engulf and change the world.
Playing video games, watching football and soap operas, falling into social media and news addictions… life is too short and there are so many great books! An integral part of the relay-baton passing on of wisdom and experience from one generation to the next, books represent the continuity of human insight and understanding. They invite us to join the great conversations that began thousands of years ago in the past and will (hopefully) continue thousands of years into the future. Will Durant called books "Maps to the City of the Gods" and the "mental heritage of our race" claiming that if he could design a 7-hour per week reading program for a person, he would "make a scholar and a philosopher" and—after 4 years—someone "as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in all the land."
Similarly to how Montana is known as “Big Sky Country,” literature could be named, “Big Mind Country.” It dissolves nationalism, undermines prejudice and chauvinism, ins pires visions of better and more meaningful lives, and ushers us along toward our true place as Citizens of the World.
Books are like secret passageways to unknown, life-changing, and unexpected realms. Normally, we pick one of these realms to explore and stay there until we finish reading the book. Another way to approach this could involve looking into multiple rather than only one of these passageways at a time. Instead of a path in a specific direction, reading could become more like a jungle with possible paths in every direction, each with it’s own color and allure. We could approach our library with openness rather than goal and look at our books listening for the one most matching the demands and urgencies of the day. We could read 50 or 100 books at the same time, a little here, a little there.
Quotes (90)
“How preferable to converse with the learned dead rather than the unedifying and noisy living!”
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
“The wise don’t fill their lessons with words or their shelves with books. The world may pass them by, but rulers turn to them when they want to learn what no one else learns.”
“About what has no color, sound, or form; mouths can’t speak and books can’t teach… We cannot find it through investigation.”
“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
“the Path is right where you stand... why would you need to search the pages for someone else's dead words?”
“When have I ever opposed the reading of books? It is only that I differ from others in the way I read... so that students do not follow upon someone else's heels or depend on teachers, friends, and books.”
“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.”
“Gold, houses, estates, garments, paintings... offer a mutable and superficial pleasure but books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”
“I weave light into words so that when your mind holds them
Your eyes will relinquish their sadness, turn bright a little brighter,
Giving to us the way a candle does in the dark.”
“When I first ascended the throne, the people were unruly and officials corrupt. If ten people were executed in the morning, a hundred were breaking the same law by evening… I turned to the Taoteching… decided to do away with capital punishment and put criminals to work instead. In the year since then, the burdens of my heart have been lightened. Truly, this book is the greatest teacher of kings.”
“They can be like the sun, words. They can do for the heart what light can for a field.”
“Some books are best tasted, some swallowed, and a very few best if chewed and digested... read not to impress, to debate, to believe; but to contemplate and consider.”
“Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”
“Ask questions about everything and investigate everything; things will start to go well when you are no longer fooled by books.”
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
“Books rule the world... [and] it is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
“Contemplating a library, one feels as though in the presence of vast capital silently yielding incalculable interest.”
“Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms… He that loves reading has everything within his reach.”
“Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.”
“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
“Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.”
“The art of not reading… remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.”
“Society is a strong solution of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves... the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies.”
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
“This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”
“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
“Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it.”
“The greatest book is the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.”
“You must learn not what people around you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together.”
“A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
“language is a beggarly medium, wholly incapable, whether with adjectives, verbs, or nouns, of giving even a hazy conception”
“Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life—only an incitement—it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it”
“A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.”
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
“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.”
“For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.”
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
“People who don’t read become imprisoned in their immediate world and their lives fall into a limited and set routine. A good book though, puts us in communion with different ages, different cultures, dead spirits from long ago that discuss aspects of life we know nothing about.”
“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book... I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books... I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library... looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books.”
“...the Great Books [are] the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof.”
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget and the reason a reader reads one is to remember.”
“The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”
“A medicine man has to be of the earth, somebody who reads nature like white men read a book.”
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
“Read the right books by the right people. Read and read and read. Find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done, and then read what he has read.”
“Ideas need no passports from their place of origin, nor visas for the countries they enter…. We, the librarians of the world, are servants of an indivisible world… Books and ideas make a boundless world.”
“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper... If the cloud in not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.”
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
“If a book is truly worth reading, it’s not a promiscuous, one-night stand. It becomes a life-long companion, the lifeblood of our insight, understanding, and wisdom. We re-read it from the different perspectives of youth, career-seeking, marriage and family, old age and the process of dying. We continually translate it into the ever-changing scope of our cultures, politics and psychology.”
“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”
“A book is like a river (and Into the same river no man can step twice) because the intellectual context, like the reader, changes steadily… We have changed and the broad intellectual climate has changed.”
“… crazy wisdom is absolute perceptiveness, with fearlessness and bluntness… being wise, but not holding to particular doctrines or disciplines or formats. There aren’t any books to follow, only endless spontaneity… all activity is created by the environment.”
“A warrior doesn’t need color television or video games… doesn’t need to read comic books… the world of entertainment doesn’t arise.”
“Books are our link to the great ideas of the past... great books, great ideas, and great individuals make history. This concept runs counter to the Marxist idea that social and economic forces make great ideas. Such great men as Socrates, Napoleon, and Lincoln all built on ideas of the past. In truth, great ideas propel people to become great in themselves.”
“The point of books is nor to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment,”
“I am one of those women who love sex... something women are still not supposed to admit in polite society... some women love sex more than they love love, some love love more than they love sex, some love them both at once... then there are women who would rather stay at home any day and read a book instead”
“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
“If you don't write it down, it didn't happen... Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won't rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours, Days, even.”
“because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the insanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments”
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