It’s said that you pay for a book twice. Once when you buy it, and again when you crack the cover to read it.
The intellectual returns from the below books have far exceeded my investment in them. They span genres and ages, however, each conveys some fundamental human truth.
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[In these books] a world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,—it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of fault.
—Desiderius Erasmus