They will no more share a book than a mistress with a friend. If they suspected their favorite volumes of delighting any eyes but their own, they would immediately discard them from the list. Theirs are superannuated beauties that every one else has left off intriguing with, bedridden hags, a ‘stud of nightmares.’
Books Quotes
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
I wrote a book when impotent to fight a battle.
No gentleman can be without three copies of a book: one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
If it is even slightly difficult, I don’t read it. (when asked “What is the most difficult book you have read?”)
Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.
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.”
