Quotations

“To stuffe a preface with praise of this boke, or with exhorting you to reding of it, were in a matter not doubtfull to take fond peine not nedefull.”

Refusing empty puffery where the book's use is already plain · Printer's preface to a law-book edition

Richard Tottel

“How unperfect the books of the laws of England were before, what price the scarceness had raised, the most part marvelously mangled, and no small part no where to be gotten.”

On restoring legal texts that scarcity and bad copying had ruined · Printer's preface to gentlemen studious of the laws of England

Richard Tottel

“All great art creates, as it were, its own stillness about it, but by the nature of its subject the Bible does more.”

Scripture as art that opens a silence before creation · He Came Down from Heaven

Charles Williams

“Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.”

Reading offered as the best use of idle hours · The Spectator

Joseph Addison

“Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.”

Authorship imagined as a gift sent forward in time · The Spectator

Joseph Addison

“True it is that my plays are not exposed unto the world in volumes, to bear the title of works (as others).”

A modest refusal to package plays as monumental collected Works · Address to the Reader, The English Traveller

Thomas Heywood

“Books? To hell with books! Books are for people who cannot think.”

Prefers living observation to borrowed print · Conversation, recorded by Elbert Hubbard

Joaquin Miller

“Therefore we believe in personality before we believe in books, and in life rather than in letters.”

States the editorial creed of his first magazine · Preface, The Poetry Review, 1912

Harold Monro

“It opened up for me Soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural.”

On reading Carpenter's Ioläus and finding honour in a love the world called shameful · Letter to Alain Locke, 3 March 1923

Countee Cullen

“I always need books, as well as other books.”

Original: J’en ai toujours besoin, ainsi que d’autres livres. — His continuing appetite for books complicates the familiar story of his complete indifference to literature after 1875. · Letter to his family from Aden, 22 September 1880 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“The books have not reached me because, I am sure, someone appropriated them in my place.”

Original: Les livres ne me sont pas parvenus, parce que, j’en suis sûr, quelqu’un se les sera appropriés à ma place. — Books remained important practical possessions even after Rimbaud had abandoned his literary career. · Letter to his family from Aden, 22 September 1880 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“The first movement of some is to consult books; the first movement of others is to look at things.”

Original: Le premier mouvement des uns est de consulter les livres; le premier mouvement des autres est de regarder les choses. — Valéry contrasts received knowledge with direct observation as different intellectual instincts. · Mauvaises pensées et autres (French)

Paul Valéry

“The wealth of a bad book is reduced to its subject.”

Original: Le sujet d'un ouvrage est à quoi se réduit un mauvais ouvrage. — A cutting distinction between a genuinely realised work and one whose subject is its only attraction. · Autres Rhumbs (French)

Paul Valéry

“Books have the same enemies as man: fire, damp, beasts, time, and their own contents.”

Original: Les livres ont les mêmes ennemis que l'homme: le feu, l'humide, les bêtes, le temps, et leur propre contenu. — A witty catalogue of the physical and intellectual threats that books must survive. · Moralités (French)

Paul Valéry

“A man who has a job, earns his living and can devote an hour a day to reading is lost to books when that hour is consumed by trivialities.”

Original: L'homme qui a un emploi, l'homme qui gagne sa vie et qui peut consacrer une heure par jour à la lecture, cette heure est dévorée par les affaires criminelles, les niaiseries incohérentes, les ragots et les faits les moins divers. — Valéry laments the competition between serious reading and the relentless stream of trivial information. · Regards sur le monde actuel (French)

Paul Valéry

“The memory a book leaves behind is more important than the book itself.”

Original: El recuerdo que deja un libro es más importante que el libro mismo. — The lasting emotional and intellectual impression of reading matters more than the physical book. · Prose remark, commonly attributed (Spanish)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“My favorite authors of prose are Cervantes, Hawthorne, Andersen, Sir Thomas Mallory.”

A compact statement of several of the literary influences and pleasures he valued most. · Auto-Analysis

Eugene Field

“I have a miscellaneous collection of books, numbering 3,500, and I am fond of the quaint and curious in every line.”

A revealing glimpse of his bibliophilic appetite and attraction to the unusual. · Auto-Analysis

Eugene Field

“When we begin reading we are insatiably curious; all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them seem to lie open before us in our books.”

Recalling the boundless appetite of a young student · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

Charles Harding Firth

“I have never regretted the hours spent in reading, even when the world called them wasted.”

Defending reading against the demand for more obviously productive occupations. · Letter

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“Books are the friends that never desert us, and in solitude they become almost living companions.”

Celebrating reading as a dependable form of companionship. · Letter

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“I have always read in books rather than through them.”

Describing reading as an active search for ideas rather than a race through pages · Autobiographical Notes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“I have made a number of books, some of which are not unknown in England.”

An understated and characteristically modest description of his literary career · Letter to Emra Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“When I read in a book it was the page or the paragraph that I wanted, and which left its impression and became a part of my intellectual furniture.”

Describing reading as the selective gathering of ideas that become part of the mind · Autobiographical Notes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Topic: Books