Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Man’s actions are the picture book of his creeds.
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.
It is a tie between men to have read the same book.
Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.
I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.
The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.
No book was ever written down by any but itself.
In every man’s memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter’s cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.
There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.