The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they might be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, “The medicines of the soul.”
Books Quotes
To have a book stimulate you as much as possible, it is also advisable that you lend it voice – your own or sometimes another person’s. The ancients are said to have read aloud even when they were alone. Rapid, cursive reading with the eyes and without sounding the words is a modern invention; this […]
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places […]
Steal not this book, my honest friend, For fear the gallows should be your end, And when you die the Lord will say, And where’s the book you stole away?
Books are like foreign countries or parts of your own land that you have never visited. You do not have to travel over them mile by mile to get a reasonably adequate idea of what they are like. The account of one honest traveler saves you that, especially if he knows you and has seen […]
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.
My book will be praised by highbrows and will be read by lowbrows. There is no writing in it that anybody with a high-school education cannot read
Tell him that some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man. (He hated the public spotlight, he said this in denying a journalist’s request to interview him)
