J. D. Salinger Quotes

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

Some people have theorized that I lurched to prove myself intellectually. But it was not any lurch. It was more a kind of awakening.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.

There are many words and definitions I have never lost. But some I am only just beginning to truly understand.

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.

True knowledge is power; but in order to feel at home with it, we must be constitutionally qualified. And if we are not, it is likely to give the soul such a twist as to deform it forever.

The finest piece of mechanism in all the universe is the brain of man. The wise person develops his brain, and opens his mind to the genius and spirit of the world's great ideas. He will feel inspired with the purest and noblest thoughts that have ever animated the spirit of humanity.

There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

There is nothing new to gain. On the other hand a man must lose his ignorance. That is all.

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old - that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.