Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. 512 Emerson: Miscellanies. The American Scholar. Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. 513 Emerson: Conduct of Life. Culture. Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood. The deep book, no matter how remote the subject, helps us best. 514. Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Inspiration. Every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. 515. Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Progress of In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. 516 Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality. The virtue of books is to be readable. 517 Emerson: Society and Solitude. Eloquence. We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. 518 Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality. Books, like metals, require to be stamped with some valuable effigies before they become popular and current. 519 Farquhar: The Twin Rivals. Preface. There is nothing so imperishable as a book. 520 James Hain Friswell: The Gentle Life. Second Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost. 521 Thomas Fuller: The Holy and Profane States. The Holy State. Of Books. Books are necessary to correct the vices of the polite; but those vices are ever changing, and the antidote should be changed accordingly, should still be new. 522 Goldsmith: The Citizen of the World. Letter lxxv. I armed her against the censures of the world, showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it. 523 Goldsmith: Vicar of Wakefield. Ch. 22, In proportion as society refines, new books must ever become more necessary. 524 Goldsmith: The Citizen of the World. Letter lxxv. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours. They are "for thoughts and for remembrance." 525 Hazlitt: The Plain Speaker. On Reading Old Books. Books are the negative pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. 526 Holmes: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Ch. 11. Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age. 527 Holmes: The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Society is a strong solution of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. 528 Holmes: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Ch. 3. Some books are edifices to stand as they are built, some are hewn stones ready to form a part of future edifices, some are quarries from which stones are to be split for shaping and after use. 529 Holmes: Pages from an Old Volume of Life. The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or library is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves. 530 Holmes: The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Ch. 8. The old books look out from the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something besides their titles, a kind of solemn greeting. Holmes: The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Ch. 2. 531 It is from books that wise men derive consolation in the troubles of life. 532 Victor Hugo: The Toilers of the Sea. It is just those books which a man possesses, but does not read, which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him. Victor Hugo: The Toilers of the Sea. Pt. i Bk. i. Ch. 4. 533 How pleasant it is to reflect that the greatest lovers of books have themselves become books. . Consider: mines themselves are exhausted; cities perish; kingdoms are swept away, and man weeps with indignation to think that his own body is not immortal, . . yet this little body of thought that lies before me in the shape of a book has existed thousands of years; nor since the invention of the press can anything short of a universal convulsion of nature abolish it. 534 Leigh Hunt: The Literary Examiner. My Books. 1823. It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old. 535 Leigh Hunt: A Book for a Corner. Introduction. Medicine for the soul. 536 Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow. 537 Washington Irving: The Sketch-Book. Roscoe. A blessed companion is a book! A book that, fitly chosen, is a life-long friend. A book, the unfailing Damon to his loving Pythias. A book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own. 538 Douglas Jerrold : Specimens of Jerrold's Wit. Books. Books have always a secret influence on the understanding: we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas. He that reads books of science, though without any desire of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them. 539 Johnson: The Adventurer. No. 137. Books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe, his power of contrasting one mode of life with another. A man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge. 540 Johnson: Boswell's Life of Johnson. III. 301. (George Birkbeck Hill, Editor, 1887.) Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all. 541 Johnson: Johnsoniana Hawkins. No. 197. No. 87. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence. 542 Johnson: The Rambler. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity, whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again, and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day. 543 Johnson: Works. VII. 337. (Oxford Edition, 1825.) Books which are no books. 544 Charles Lamb: Detached Thoughts on Books. As companions and acquaintances books are without rivals, and they are companions and acquaintances to be had at all times and under all circumstances. They are never out when you knock at the door, are never "not at home" when you call. In the lightest as well as in the deepest moods they may be applied to, and will never be found wanting. In the good sense of the phrase, they are all things to all men, and are faithful alike to all. 545 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. As friends and companions, as teachers and consolers, as recreators and amusers, books are always with us, and always ready to respond to our wants. We can take them with us in our wanderings, or gather them round us at our firesides. In the lonely wilderness and the crowded city, their spirit will be with us, giving a meaning to the seemingly confused movements of humanity, and peopling the desert with their own bright creations. 546 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. Books are also among man's truest consolers. In the hour of affliction, trouble, or sorrow, he can turn to them with confidence and trust. 547 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defence. 548 John Alfred Langford: The Praise of Books. Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings. 549 Longfellow: Kavanagh. Ch. 13. The best books are not always those which lend themselves to discussion and comment, but those (like Montaigne's Essays) which discuss and comment ourselves. 550 Lowell: Books and Libraries. Address. Chelsea, There is a choice in books as in friends, and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in. 551 Lowell: Books and Libraries. Address. Chelsea, Mass., Dec. 22, 1885. To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature. 552 Lowell: My Study Windows. Carlyle. What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us! 553 Lowell: My Study Windows. Library of Old The debt which he owes to them is incalculable; they have guided him to truth; they have filled his mind with noble and graceful images; they have stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides on; fortune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. 554 Macaulay Essays. Lord Bacon. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. dead there is no change. 555 In the Macaulay Essays. Lord Bacon. For books are as meats and viands are: some of good, some of evil substance. 556 Milton: Areopagitica. It is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men, and therefore to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors, for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men; and yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who kills a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. 557 Milton: Areopagitica. |