Books Quotes

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.

A classic is a book everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read.

For this reason poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; and more worthy of serious attention than history.

Ideas in the mind are the transcript of the world; words are the transcript of ideas; and writing and printing are the transcript of words.

Books are the legacies of that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

The book is on the table.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution--such call I good books.

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

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

The real risks for any artist are taken...in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it--when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'