Nothing, while I live and think, can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps, if fortune turns her face once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance some quiet day to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy. 462 Leigh Hunt: The Literary Examiner. My Books. 1823. Without the love of books the richest man is poor; but endowed with this treasure of treasures, the poorest man is rich. He has wealth which no power can diminish, riches which are always increasing, possessions which the more he scatters the more they accumulate, friends who never desert him, and pleasures which never cloy. 463 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and happiest of the children of men. 464 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. Nineteen honest brown backs are dear to a lover of books, but they scare a mere reader, whose weaker faith must be fortified by small doses, and whose unaccustomed organs can only digest food when it has been well minced. 465 BIGOTRY. Stanley Lane-Poole: Selections from the Prose Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost. BIOGRAPHY. A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely. 467 Longfellow: Hyperion. Bk. i. Ch. 8. There is no kind of writing, which has truth and instruction for its main object, so interesting and popular, on the whole, as biography. History, in its larger sense, has to deal with masses, which, while they divide the attention by the dazzling variety of objects, from their very generality are scarcely capable of touching the heart. The great objects on which it is employed have little relation to the daily occupations with which the reader is most intimate. A nation, like a corporation, seems to have no soul, and its checkered vicissitudes may be contemplated rather with curiosity for the lessons they convey than with personal sympathy. How different are the feelings excited by the fortunes of an individual, one of the mighty mass, who in the page of history is swept along the current unnoticed and unknown. 468 William H. Prescott: Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. Sir Walter Scott. BIRDS. Birds are the world's happy children. 469 Samuel Willoughby Duffield: Essay. Apple-Tree BLESSINGS. Blessings may appear under the shape of pains, losses, and disappointments, but let him have patience, and he will see them in their proper figure. 470 BLUNDERERS. Addison: The Guardian. No. 117. To speak and to offend, with some people, are but one and the same thing. 471 La Bruyère: Characters. Of the Heart. (Rowe, Translator.) BLUSHES - see Authors. 472 Better a blush in the face than a blot in the heart. Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. ii. Bk. iii. Ch. 44. (Jarvis, Translator.) I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt or illbreeding. 473 Congreve: The Way of the World. Act i. Sc. 9. Blushes are badges of imperfection. 474 BOASTING. Wycherley: Love in a Wood. Act i. Sc. 1. A fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him. 475 Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing. Activ. Sc. 2. BOLDNESS. Be bold, first gate. second gate. Be not 476 Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold, too bold, third gate. Inscription on the Gates of Busyrane. BOOKS -see America, Authors, Bible, The, Bibliophilism, Bibliographers, Companionship, Conversation, Criticism, Fiction, History, Learning, Libraries, Printing, Quotation, Reading, Science. Books are the legacies 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. 477 Addison: The Spectator. No. 166. A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers. 478 A. Bronson Alcott: Tablets. Bk. i. Pt. vi. Books. As with friends, one finds new beauties at every interview, and would stay long in the presence of those choice companions. As with friends, he may dispense with a wide acquaintance: few and choice. 479 A. Bronson Alcott: Table Talk. Bk. i. Pt. i. Bk. i. Pt. i. It is a wise book that is good from title-page to the end. Next to a friend's discourse, no morsel is more delicious than a ripe book; a book whose flavor is as refreshing at a thousandth tasting as at the first. 481 A. Bronson Alcott: Concord Days. June. Books. That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with profit. 482 A. Bronson Alcott: Table Talk. Bk. i. Pt. i. The freedom of the press has never been denied to us, and that in all our history those who have sought the companionship which is found in good books, whether for the light which they shed upon the mind, or the consolation which they bestow upon smitten hearts, have not sought it in vain. 483 Joseph Anderson: Address. The Growth of a Christian Literature. (Centennial Papers. General Conference of the Congregational Churches of Connecticut, 1876.) By my books I can conjure up before me to a momentary existence many of the great and good men of past ages, and for my individual satisfaction they seem to act again the most renowned of their achievements; the orators declaim for me, the historians recite, the poets sing. 484 Dr. Arnott: The Elements of Physics. Books make men alone for themselves. 485 Auerbach: On the Heights. (Bennett, Trans.) You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand. 486 Richard Aungerryle (Richard de Bury): Philobiblon. The images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. 487 Bacon: Advancement of Learning. Bk. i. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. 488 Bacon: Essays. Of Studies. BOOKS. Great store of all sorts of good books (through the great He that cannot buy, mercy of God) are common among us. may borrow. 489 Richard Baxter: Compassionate Counsel to A book is a garden. A book is an orchard. A book is a 490 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. It is full of conversation withA book is good company. out loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. 491 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth There is no time in life when books do not influence a man. 492 Walter Besant: Books Which Have Influenced Me. There is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us. 493 Sir S. Egerton Brydges: The Ruminator. No. 22. They All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. are the chosen possession of men. 494 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as I conceive that books are like men's souls, divided into sheep and goats. Some few are going up, and carrying us up, heavenward; calculated, I mean, to be of priceless advantage in teaching, in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others, a frightful multitude, are going down, down; doing ever the more and the wider and the wilder mischief. 495 Carlyle: Miscellanies. Inaugural Address, If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. 496 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. 497 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Man of Letters. My books are friends that never fail me. 498 Carlyle Letter to his Mother, March 17, 1817. No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. 499 Carlyle Essays. Goethe's Helena. The true university of these days is a collection of books. 500 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Man of Letters. Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but then a spiritual field; like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have books that already number some hundred and fifty human ages); and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (commentaries, deductions, philosophical, political systems, or were it only sermons, pamphlets, journalistic essays), every one of which is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. 501 Carlyle: Sartor Resartus. Bk. ii. Ch. 8. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling, if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society, in the place where I live. 502 William Ellery Channing: Self-Culture. Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Boston, 1838. It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. 503 William Ellery Channing: Self-Culture. Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Boston, 1838. Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, ailliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart. 504 William Ellery Channing: Self-Culture. Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Boston, 1838. |