Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea?

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

The first responsibility of the Muslim is as teacher. That is his job, to teach. His first school, his first classroom is within the household. His first student is himself. He masters himself and then he begins to convey the knowledge that he has acquired to the family. The people who are closest to him.

A book is not completed till it's read.

I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.

I was really unfit last year, so I worked out for a long time, then spent time by myself in Oregon. For about two months the only person I saw was my trainer. Every day I did a lot of running and I just didn’t want to talk to anyone for two months. So when I started talking again, it was like you would communicate wrongly, like you wouldn’t really remember how to speak. That was one of the key things as well as just reading the book, reading the script a million times, just figuring things out.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

"Books ... books, ..." he exclaims. It is those that teach us to refine on our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

At Zappos, one of our core values is to Pursue Growth and Learning. In the lobby of our headquarters, we have a giving library where we give away books to employees and visitors that we think will help with their growth, both personally and professionally. I can't wait to add The Compound Effect to our library.

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

Books don't prattle. Books don't make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It's a very satisfying partnership.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.