A Quote by Ian Mcewan

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

Ian Mcewan

Quote Topics

Annihilation Barely Element Exist Greatest Know Perhaps Pleasure Reading Self

Quote Author

Ian Mcewan
British - Novelist
Born: June 21, 1948

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

William Hazlitt

To fight is to face death once more, perhaps the total annihilation of their kind. But to run... is that not also a kind of annihilation?

Nalini Singh

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Vernon Lee

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

Marcel Proust

The things which ... are esteemed as the greatest good of all ... can be reduced to these three headings, to wit : Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.

Baruch Spinoza

Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

Martin Heidegger

Perhaps the greatest self-deceit is to tell ourselves that we can be self-sufficient.

Joseph Stowell

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

W. G. Sebald

Beauty, pleasure, and the good things of life are intensified, and perhaps only exist, by reason of contrast.

Walter J. Phillips

The idea that somehow "no self, no problem"- I don't exist because I don't have a self- would be a mistaken understanding. However, the selflessness teaching is not that hard to understand. What it means is a type of self that people feel they have, like a fixed, unchanging identity. Either they know they have it, or for some, they feel they need to seek it, and possibly have an experience where they feel like they found something. That type of fixed, unchanging, essential self, or absolute self doesn't exist. That's what "no self" means.

Robert Thurman

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

John Ashbery

The greatest element in life is not what occupies most of its time, else sleep would stand high in the scale. Nor is it what engrosses most of its thought, else money would be very high. The two or three hours of worship and preaching weekly has perhaps been the greatest signal influence on English life. Half an hour of prayer, morning or evening, every day, may be a greater element in shaping our course than all our conduct and all our thought.

Peter Forsyth

I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.

Henry Rollins

The greatest achievement is selflessness. The greatest worth is self-mastery. The greatest quality is seeking to serve others. The greatest precept is continual awareness. The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything. The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways. The greatest magic is transmuting the passions. The greatest generosity is non-attachment. The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind. The greatest patience is humility. The greatest effort is not concerned with results. The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go. The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Atisa

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.