A Quote by Italo Calvino

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.
My parents were distrustful of the outside world. They didn't think much good came out of it... The outside world was this strange place that was not so much dangerous as not as interesting as what went on in the house.
If you have decided to change the world, don't read the books about the dimensions of the world! Be like a meteorite; strike the world with your ideas with utter courage and with infinite fearlessness!
I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.
My belief, through my experiences, is that the world in which we live is but an illusionary world, a world that one day we will leave behind as we travel on toward our destiny and toward reality.
You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.
It's very easy to look for happiness outside ourselves; in a relationship, a dream job, or the perfect body weight. When we chase happiness externally, we're simply looking for God in all the wrong places. The outside search is based on false projections we place on the world. These projections build up a wall against true happiness, which lies within us.
Isn't it great to know that you cannot control your world from the outside? To try and control things on the outside feels impossible because it would take so much work, and in fact it is impossible according to the law of attraction. To change your world all you have to do is manage your thoughts and feelings on the inside of you, and then your whole world changes.
You are a victim of your own neural architecture which doesn't permit you to imagine anything outside of three dimensions. Even two dimensions. People know they can't visualise four or five dimensions, but they think they can close their eyes and see two dimensions. But they can't.
Learn by doing. Learn through experiences. And this goes back to Steve Jobs' thing - which is the way you open up your knowledge of the world is by discovering it and learning about it, not through books, but by being there.
Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
I call the transformed world toward which we can move ‘sustainable,’ by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.
There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.
This world is not the same to all people. Each one lives in his little domain....Peace and harmony may reign in one person's world; where strife and restlessness in anothers. But whatever the circumstances of one's environment, it consists of both an inner and an outer world. The outside world is the one in which your life engages in action and interaction. The world inside of you determines your happiness or unhappiness.
If you want to take your mission in life to the next level, if you're stuck and you don't know how to rise, don't look outside yourself. Look inside. Don't let your fears keep you mired in the crowd. Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory.
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
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