The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author’s book at all, but rather in the reader’s head.
Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.
We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.
A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.
What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?
A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.
How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?
The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.
In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.
It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book -I call that vicious!
It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so-not to speak of boots.