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We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.
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On Visiting Bookshops, Pipefuls (1921)

 

Christopher Morley

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You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's — not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you — not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity — not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul — a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's.

 

John Selden

 

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

 

Doris Lessing

 

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

 

John Ruskin

 

We are resorting to this authenticity in order to rediscover our soul, which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.

 

Mobutu Sese Seko

 

What's behind this phenomenal success? Very simply, it is a manifestation of the hunger for the spiritual spreading around the world. It's a hunger with very special characteristics. People aren't buying set formulas any more, or pius platitudes redolent of an era gone by; beaten tracks that did not succeed in bringing people to a spiritual awakening. There is an anguished search, sometimes confused in its direction, for a more liberal outlook. Modern man mired in profound cultural change first wants to know who he is, what imprisons his soul, what stands in the way of spiritual progress. He wants to rediscover the God beyond all that has been identified through the years with the name of God: laws, norms, doctrines not made flesh, words stranged from life.
That is why Tony de Mello said that "our violent spirituality has created problems for us", that "Jesus Christ has got a bad name because of what is said of Him from pulpits" and that "it is very difficult to recognise a saint because he looks like the rest of us". In short, what Tony de Mello is telling us is that if we want to make Christianity credible we need to plumb the depths of the human spirit, to reach beyond our present frontiers.

 

Anthony de Mello