Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

لا يدرك الناس أن كتابا واحدا قد يغير حياة انسان

People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.

The things that change your life are: the people you meet, the classes you take, and the books you read.

Books are more likely to change minds than conversations.

There is too much happening internally during conversation:

Did that sound stupid?<br/>What do they think of me?<br/>Will I lose the friendship over this opinion?

Books can let you chew on an idea without social risk.

ان الناس لاتعرف ان كتابا واحدا كفيل بان يغير مجرى حياة الانسان.

People don't like to change their minds. Once they perceive you one way, that's it. They kind of file you away in their minds as a certain kind of person. You cannot become a different person in their minds.

She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

People want to change their lives. They want to change other people’s lives, too. They want to change the injustices they see. They want to change the whole damn world. But they do not want to change themselves. (Not their image. Not their appearance. Not their worldly success. Themselves.) Which is, as it turns out, the one thing they can change. The one thing that must change first.

There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, 'Well, he's different from me - I could never do it.' What's wrong with most people is that they have this block - they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.

When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.

“A man is what he thinks about all day long.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Aldous Huxley

People are changed not by exhortations to do things but by experiences... they may be changed by experience, in a way that could never be achieved with mere good advice.

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard — the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives.

People are terrified of changing their minds. Changing your mind is a door you don’t want to open because you don’t know what’s behind it. Changing your mind means losing all your friends. Changing your mind means a complete revolution in your life. Changing your mind means publicly admitting you’ve been wrong. […] People don’t want to change their minds.