Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.
Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
Re-examine all you have been told in school or in church, or in any book; dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
In other words, the percentage change in book value in any given year is likely to be reasonably close to that year’s change in intrinsic value.
A good book is like a seed: it produces fruit that has in it seed for more fruit. It is not a picture on the wall; it is a window that invies us to wider horizons.
The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
The book of Acts is the best aid in approaching our work. We do not find there anyone consecrating himself as a preacher nor anyone deciding to do the Lord’s work by making himself a missionary or a pastor. What we do see is the Holy Spirit Himself appointing and sending men out to do the work.
The gospel we preach must not be just something we hear from men or read from books or even conceived through our meditation. Unless it is delivered to us by God, it can serve no spiritual utility.
There’s a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. Knowing about God is all of the stuff we’ve been told and all of the books we’ve read and all of our religious experiences and what others have told us and tried to convince us of. But knowing God is when we make conscious contact.
I really believe that God builds all the bridges, writes all the books, and delivers all the speeches. When I say God, again, I mean that source we all come from, we all are pieces of, and we all are connected to.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not know where the energy and the words come from. I just sit down, and soon it is flowing through my hand and onto the paper.
There’s the one thing no nation can ever accuse us of and that is secret diplomacy. Our foreign are an open book, generally a check book.
Foreign relations is an open book – generally a checkbook.
Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
It is so human a book that I don’t see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.