A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.
A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
A good novel tells us the truth about it's hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
A good title is the title of a successful book.
A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. 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 always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
A library is thought in cold storage.
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
A multitude of books distracts the mind.
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
| Quotations 21 to 40 of 371 | First | < Previous | Next > | Last |