“If you cannot read them [books], at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”
Winston Churchill
“In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my bookfriends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their large loves and heavenly charities.”
— Helen Keller Primary source“I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.”
— Helen Keller Primary source“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are: 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary sourceReading Library Love Paris Wisdom