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Master books, but do not let them master you. - Read to live, not live to read.

To utter pleasant words without practising them, is like a fine flower without fragrance.

Poetry puts the infinite within the finite.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world- they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

There is no book so bad but something valuable may be derived from it.

There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly wrought out by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.

They dwell in the odor of camphor, they stand in a Sheraton shrine, they are "warranted early editions," These worshipful tomes of mine. In their creamiest "Oxford vellum," In their redolent, "crushed Levant," with their delicate watered linings, they are jewels of price, I grant. Blind-tooled and morocco-jointed, they have Zaehnsdorf's daintiest dress, they are graceful, attenuate, polished, but they gather the dust, no less. For the row that I prize is yonder, away on the unglazed shelves, the bulged and the bruised octavos, the dear and the dumpy twelves. Montaigne with his sheepskins blistered, and Howell the worse for wear, and the worm-drilled Jesuits's Horace, and the little old cropped Moliere, and the Burton I bought for a florin, and the Rabelais foxed and flea'd, for the others I never have opened, but those are the books I read.

How forcible are right words!

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.

Books are ships which pass through the vast sea of time.

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return ex reason.