I recently enjoyed taking in a copy of The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes, by Otto L. Bettmann. I found this book, published a few decades ago, on the wooden shelves of Strand Book Store in New York City. It is a treasure!
Behold a sampling of the hundreds of quotes filling the pages of this well-researched tome:
“A
bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate,
to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.” –Sir Hugh
Walpole
“Books
are the carriers of civilization.
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled,
thought and speculation at a standstill.
They are engines of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses’ (as a
poet said) ‘erected in the sea of time.” –Barbara W. Tuchman
“Books
are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual
world.” – Walter Pater
“A
truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living
on its hint… What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.” –Henry David
Thoreau
“No
entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” –Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu
“Every
man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiple
the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and
interesting.” --Aldous Huxley
“Employ
your time in improving yourself by other men’s writing so that you shall come
easily by what others have labored hard for.” –Socrates
“A
room without books is a body without a soul.” –Marcus Tullius Cicero
“A
library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history
comes to life.” –Norman Cousins
“A
library is that venerable [place where men preserve the history of their
experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans… in
books may be found the recipes for daily living – the prescriptions for the
mind and the heart.” –Georges Duhamel
“The
multitude of books is making us ignorant.” –Voltaire
“To
buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read
them. As it is, the act of purchasing
them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content.”
–Arthur Schopenhauer
“The
enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the
greatest evils of this age, since it presents one of the most serious obstacles
to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader’s way piles
of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter,
peradventure interspersed.” –Edgar Allen Poe
“What
refuge is there for the victim who is possessed 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.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Writing
is both mask and unveiling” –E. B. White
“I
have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an
enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme,
and a mind awake.” –Washington Irving
“Henry
James joyously engaged in the act of writing.
A good day’s writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over
chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.”
–Leon Edel
“To
write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise
man.” –Aristotle
“A
good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.” –Ellen Glasgow
“The
two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and
familiar things new.” –Samuel Johnson
“The
profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable
business.” –John Steinbeck
“Some
day I hope to write a book, where the royalties will pay for the copies I give
away.” –Clarence Darrow
“Books
won’t stay banned – Ideas won’t go to jail.” –Alfred Whitney Griswold
“Every
burned book enlightens the world.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We
all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot
be killed by fire. People die, but books
never die… Books are weapons… make them weapons for man’s freedom.” –Franklin
D. Roosevelt
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Brian
Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and
not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email
him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in
the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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