The sages are often ignorant of physical science, because they read the wrong book-the book within; and the scientists are too often ignorant of religion, because they too read the wrong book-the book outside.
What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
The reason I haven’t been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven’t had one decent coherent thought to put down.
My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.
I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people’s minds and souls.
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
Someone said, ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.
A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.
Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the ‘limit text’ of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
I’m as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one’s sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.
The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.
I am rather more apt to read old books than new ones.
Rough board shelves hold a number of books, without which some of the evenings would be long indeed.
There are rainy days in autumn and stormy days in winter when the rocking chair in front of the fire simply demands an accompanying book.
Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.
It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!
My books are friends that never fail me.
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.