Quotes
Quotes about Books
But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
They castrate the books of other men in order that with the fat of their works they may lard their own lean volumes.
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. - Among My Books, 1870.
If love and sex are such natural phenomenons how come there are so many books on how to?
Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I'll be writing books, but if not, I'll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
Who knows what we live, and struggle, and die?... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. - "In the Nature of the Physical World", 1928.
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
Got no check books, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I'm afraid we have become a nation of plodders, who feel that all problems can be found in books and that the answers are on a certain page.
Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.
With books and money placed, for show Like nest eggs, to make clients lay, And for his false opinion pay.
Besides, as is usually the case, we are much more affected by the words which we hear, for though what you read in books may be more pointed, yet there is something in the voice, the look, the carriage, and even the gesture of the speaker, that makes a deeper impression upon the mind. [Lat., Praeterea multo magis, ut vulgo dicitur viva vox afficit: nam licet acriora sint, quae legas, ultius tamen in ammo sedent, quae pronuntiatio, vultus, habitus, gestus dicentis adfigit.]
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
They had their lean books with the fat of others' works.
Because they commonly make use of treasure found in books, as of other treasure belonging to the dead and hidden underground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape and image of the one as much as of the other.
My books need no one to accuse or judge you: the page which is yours stands up against you and says, "You are a thief."
He liked those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces By plucking bon-mots from their places.
