What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.
Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, – for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.
We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.
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.
Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.
Do not read the newspapers.
Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
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.
I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.