A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them – the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
Each book has a secret history of ways and means.
Books are the true metempsychosis, – they are the symbol and presage of immortality. The dead men are scattered, and none shall find them. Behold they are here! they do but sleep.
Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls.
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.
I don’t think I’ve read any of the books that have been written about me.
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l’Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.
A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
Books have their destinies.
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made – you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.