The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which ‘permits, invites, or compels’ good reading.
Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.
If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.
If they won’t write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.
Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say “at last”, I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do – so much have I enjoyed it.
Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.
I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
I should think that an ordinary copy of the King James version would have been good enough for those Congressmen.
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection...
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.