"All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time."

"What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?"

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

"You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement."

"Being a novelty had its advantages."

"My first book was an open letter to my three daughters."

"A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

"Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil."

"Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."

"If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read."

"Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work."

"Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."

"We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it."

"A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never."

"If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free"

"Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men and women"

"Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."

"You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends."

"A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man."

"I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn."

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Options – the ability to choose – is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money – a lot more money – by doing half of what you are doing now.