You won’t find the Alice books reprinted in Mortimer Adler’s set of “The Great Books of the Western World”, but I venture to state the following: It is permissible today to consider a person educated if he or she has not read, say “Das Capital” or books by Hegel and Freud, or indeed more than […]
Books Quotes
I am filling my house with books which I am bound to read, and wondering whether the new heavens which await the soul (after the fatal hour) will allow the consultation of these.
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you… I believe that the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you, to tell you that they have something inside their covers that will be good for you, and that they are willing and desirous to […]
A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The people who are always monkeying with these great books to make them fully (comprehensible) have no friend in me, for in their realm the fully comprehensible is not worth comprehending.
Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
People are expected to read (Vanity Fair) during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read Thackeray’s book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are thirty-six, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for […]
Sir, my friend John Baynes used to say that the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.
