Thoughtful Book Excerpts
I don't know about you, but I find when I read a book, I often don't absorb much if I read it through just once. When I just try to read a book straight through from cover to cover, it seems my focus is just to get through "reading" the book and so I don't learn much from it.
In most cases, in terms of nonfiction, it's probably more effective NOT to read the book from cover to cover but to read only parts of the book many times. Reading a book this way is sort of like how one might play a few songs from a record many times but skip over certain songs.
Another trick I use for absorbing what I read, besides reading something over several times, is to think of the sentences as possible "quotations" or excerpts. This enables my mind to focus on the meaning of sentences as I read them.
Of course, some books are written in a style that makes them more "quotable" than others, but I'm sure most books are quotable, more or less.
Here's some "quotations" I pulled out from the book As A Man Thinketh by James Allen:
- A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild, but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.
- Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
- The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combination of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
Just think about it!
Recent Comments
9
See more comments
great post that's one of my favorite books
Thanks. Yes, it's a short and sweet book.