When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

We don’t mature momentarily, but over the long-term.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Who’s to say what’s a good voice and not a good voice?

Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experienes that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.

Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents‘ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can’t even lift them.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It’s made up of pioneers, the beginners. That’s where the action is.

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

What I love best in life is new starts.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.