A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.
What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!
Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever.
There are as many strata at different levels of life as there are leaves in a book. When on the higher levels we can remember the lower levels, but when on the lower we cannot remember the higher.
Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.
All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.
The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.
Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
The Library is a wilderness of books.
There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.