Books And Self-Discovery

Table of Contents

• Books as a Path to Self-Discovery
• Books as Companions and Teachers
• Books and the Transformation of Self
• Books and the Search for Knowledge
• Books as Mirrors of Life
• The Power and Impact of Books
• Books and Personal Growth
• Books and Experience
• The Magic and Mystery of Books
• Other

Books as a Path to Self-Discovery

After reading a good book, something must change in you! If nothing changed, then you can be sure that you haven't read the book with your soul!

Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie: Reading centers on finding yourself in a book.

I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears.After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.

After reading a book, you become someone else: Now you are not you, but you plus the book!

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

Books as Companions and Teachers

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

Reading books exposeses you to different lives

You'll enjoy it. There is much you can learn from books and scrolls," said Jeod. He gestured at the walls. "These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.""It sounds intriguing," admitted Eragon."Always the scholar, aren't you?" asked Brom.Jeod shrugged. "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile.

I'm not, like, a book guy, but isn't the point of all this book stuff like what Ms. Croft was teaching us -- that unrestricted access to books allows us to be challenged and changed? To learn new things and to critically think about those things and not be afraid of them? To be better than we were before we read them?

People who know and love the same books as you, have the road map to your soul.

What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams. And certainly that's what I want them to take away.

That is the magical thing about books. You can listen to all the greatest people who have ever lived, anywhere in the world, in any civilization. You can see what is completely different about them, things you never imagined.

Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand.

Books and the Transformation of Self

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears.After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

Books have given me great stores of happiness, but if I am honest with myself I can see they have also taken something away. I glimpsed the real world between paragraphs of novels. I traced words when I might have touched the ground...Sometimes books have housed me and sometimes they have encased me.

There is nothing better than being able to swim in a pool of knowledge so deep it forces ignorance to be uncomfortable in its own skin, to where it no longer holds a sense of being, a sense of purpose. That’s what books do. They allow us to live in the minds of every type of human. They allow us to taste the kind of freedom that even the end of slavery didn’t bring.

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.

I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me.

When you read a great book at one point in your life then in another part of your life, when you read the same book, it's like it was just written because now what you bring to the experience is so much richer.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

Books and the Search for Knowledge

You don't find interesting stuff because you don't search enough, ... every book has it's own lesson. But sometimes it's difficult to get it!

Each book you read not only teaches you something new, but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffet says 'That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest'.

I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.

When you’re surrounded by books it reminds you of what you don’t know.

It comes a point in which you don't know if you write books or the books write you

In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.

When I do research, I cast my net very widely and then snatch what feels right out of that. Occasionally I'll read a specific book for a specific book, but usually I'm trying to increase my general understanding.

I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.

Books as Mirrors of Life

It's stupid, really," I began again. "But it was this thing I read someplace, and it really got to me. It said that a dictionary is every book ever written and every book that will be written, just in a different order. And it seemed magical. You could own every book just by owning one book. I loved that. And I just had to have it,

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Books are treasure of Stories that want to be heard in silence by an individual who understands

Actually, it is amazing how much can be learned about people from the books they own.

People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

For someone with so many books and such desire to obtain new copies, you seem awfully ambivalent about them.” “I know their power and impact. It is all about perception, is it not, Miss Chase?” She studied him. “I like to think it is about content, Lord Downing. But perception does lay a gloss on the surface. A finger must but swirl beneath.

The Power and Impact of Books

I'm told by my young friends that experience is much more important than books. Of course Ben Franklin had something to say about experience and fools, but even Franklin thought that a fool would learn by his experience. That has proven false in the modern world. Some people are simply unwilling to learn under any circumstances, which maybe, even then, wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damned proud of it.

Don't you dare not take action on the new things you've learnt by reading this book!

Everything I have learned has not come from books, it has come experientially over time under pressure walking with Christ".~ R. Alan Woods [2012]

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?

Why do you want to read others' books when there is the book of yourself?

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books

If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?

Books and Personal Growth

You will never know the purpose of a book in your life until you read it, and you will never know which book you should be reading until you read many others that you shouldn’t.

Solara: I didn't think you'd ever give up the book, I thought it was too important to youEli: It was, I was carrying and reading it everyday, got so caught up in protecting it, I forgot to live by what I'd learnt from itSolara: And what's that?Eli: To do more for others than you do for yourself

Just because you read books doesn't mean you know everything," Faiz tells her. "I work. Life's the best teacher. Everyone says so." "Only people who can't read say such things," Pari says.

I knew you talked to books. I didn't realize they listened.

A few diaries could replace tons of self help books simply because their written in the first person...

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children—you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it.

I knew you talked to books. I didn't realize they listened

You taught me to think, and you put ideas in my head. People read to forget. Books don't change the world, ji. You didn't tell me that. You talked of the dignity of the human spirit to a hijra.

My reputation when I was first here was that I had every single answer in the book. I don't know, maybe I portrayed that somehow. I was learning, and I continue to learn and I have learned.

I often feel like books find us for reasons, and we read them when we need them the most.

I've always said if somebody wrote a book and they took their whole life to learn that knowledge in that book, why you won't just read that book to learn what they know? I have never seen anyone take a book combining Faith, personal Development and life stories that are just so practical and relatable to our own generation.

Books and Experience

It takes courage to knowingly read a book that is challenging some of your cherished beliefs.

A lot of books in the self-help section of your bookstore really belong in the fiction section.

I'm not constantly looking for the "right" in my thoughts. I am, actually, scared of absolute “rights”. Therefore, I don't think my book will appeal to people who seek concrete formulas from me to be happy and who have designed their lives mechanically. But I do believe my book can give something to people who live their lives going from information to information like a bee, who depend on their own syntheses as the outcomes and have flexible thought, and who could be an "individual".

Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge.

The Magic and Mystery of Books

Books will only get you so far; it’s vital to trust in what’s there outside of your comprehension, that which you can’t really know: God. Even the books about Him don’t come close.

Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

Who knows how things happen when one is on a quest or writing a book? It is as if one searches and searches and then, if one can move past the ego's demands and is lucky, sometimes a space opens where books seem to fall open in one's lap and things and people appear, as if magically, to help. Some call it synchronicity or being in the flow; I find it to be a blessed, though often short-lived, state of grace for which I am deeply grateful.

But there’s something about letting a book take up space in your life, reminding me of what it contains and what it means to me. Maybe that’s kind of sentimental, but it’s actually helpful for me to like pay reverence to the words that have encouraged me, and helped me to find something I am.

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.

That's why I haven't been so anxious. But now, lots of people write and say, 'I want to find out what you're doing.' So I know that this book will enlighten them.

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

You think you choose the subjects of your books. But sometimes, in ways you don't know, the books choose you.

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don’t know that I am their reader.

Other

Book sense makes sense because someone has gone through it before and able to share it with you. Your job is to listen and discern.

Not everyone who reads ancient books is a seeker. Most of them just relate to the characters and stories just like we relate to the characters of other books and TV shows.

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

‎Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

The first challenge is that, you cannot expect everyone to get the same understanding of the book. Are we not all unique in life?

It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks.

We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

I think within all of us, there is a void, a gap waiting to be filled by something. For me, that something is books and all their proffered experiences.

You must be among those who apply critical-thinking and solve the presented challenges from experience, rather than from the knowledge of books alone.

Sometimes I long to be ignorant, then I would enjoy bliss. Books will forever keep me from this endeavor.

When you read "The Secret" it tells you "Do not take no one's advice, but read books" Ain't that the same, people's ideas are in books also, unless you write the book yourself ?

Solara: Do you really read the same book everyday?Eli: Without fail.

It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.

The books are the books, and a lot of the stuff is some version of your id or your ego.

Most of you probably didn't know that I have a new book out. Some guy put together a collection of my wit and wisdom - or, as he calls it, my accidental wit and wisdom. But I'm kind of proud that my words are already in book form.

When the book comes out it may hurt you - but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.

Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

I think you always go out and do books based on what you're curious about.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

My books are based on observing others, not myself.

Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason.

As I get older, the book projects are - liberating is one word, but they really are me.

But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness.

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

People have filled an enormously important role in my life - more than books! For me, it's not the formal advising or the therapy that meant so much. It was more the fact that someone committed himself or herself to me. They were really interested in my life; they wanted to know what I was doing; they followed me; they dared to confront and challenge me.

When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.

You'll enjoy it. There is much you can learn from books and scrolls," said Jeod. He gestured at the walls. "These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life." "It sounds intriguing," admitted Eragon. "Always the scholar, aren't you?" asked Brom. Jeod shrugged. "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile.

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

I don't think people need to know much about me to understand the book, or to enjoy it. The book stands by itself. Over the last several years, my life has been all about writing these books, but the books aren't about my life.

This book is pointing the way into it for people that see it as daunting or a mystery. Some people just do it, but others need help with the mindset, permission almost to listen to themselves. Understanding how things work is the key.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t.

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