Quotes
“Readers
may be divided into four classes:
"Sponges
who absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state, only a little
dirtied.
Sand-glasses,
who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of
getting through the time.
Strain-bags,
who retain nearly the dregs of what they read.
Mogul
diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable
others to profit by it also.
“Hence
the multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which choke
the true corn. Such books rob the public
of time, money, and attention, which ought properly to belong to good
literature and noble aims, and they are written with a view merely to make
money or occupation. They are therefore
not merely useless, but injurious.”
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga
and Paralipomena
“Books
are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without
windows. No man has the right to bring up his children without surrounding them
with books, if he has the means to buy them.
It is a wrong to his family. He
cheats them! Children learn to read by
being in the presence of books. The love
of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.
“A
little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s
history. It is a man’s duty to have
books. A library is not a luxury, but
one of the necessities of life.”
--Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) Sermons
“Oh!
But books are such safe company! They
keep your Secrets well: they never boast
that they made your eyes glisten, or your cheek flush, or your heart
throb. You may take up your favorite
Author, and love him at a distance just as warmly as you like, for all the
sweet fancies and glowing thoughts that have winged your lonely hours so
fleetly and so sweetly.
“You
may have a thousand petty, provoking, irritating annoyances through the day,
and you shall come back again to your dear old book, and forget them all in
dreamland. It shall be a friend that
shall be always at hand; that shall never try you by caprice, or pain you by
forgetfulness, or wound you by distrust.”
--Sara P. Parton (Fanny Fern: 1811-1872),
Fern Leaves
“The
book is your physician, guardian, guide:
It heals your hate, and cures your frenzied mood.”
--Victor Hugo (1802-1885), L’Annie Terrible
“The celebrated library at Alexandria was
probably the largest collection ever brought together before the invention of
printing. It is said to have been
founded by Ptolemy Soter about 283 B.C., and increased by his successors until
it contained, according to Aulus Gellius, 700,000 volumes During the siege of
Alexandria by Julius Ceasar, a great part of this library was burnt by a fire,
which spread from the shipping to the city; it was soon re-established and augmented
by the addition of the library founded by Eumenes, King of Pergamus (the
accredited inventor of parchment), which collection, amounting to 200,000
volumes, Marc Antony presented to Cleopatra, Alexandria flourished as one of
the chief seats of literature until it was taken by the Arabs, 640 A.D. The library was then burnt, according to the
story generally believed, in consequence of the fanatic decision of the Caliph
Omar: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God, they are
useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and
ought to be destroyed. Accordingly it is
said, they were employed to heat the 4000 baths of the city; and such was their
number that six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of the precious
fuel.”
--John Power, A Handy-Book About Books
“That
literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage and our shared patrimony is
a given. The Greeks have their Iliad and Odyssey, the Chines their Tao
te Ching, the Indians their Mahabharata,
the Italians their Divine Comedy, the
Spanish their Don Quixote, and each
of these works is a literary masterpiece that is transcendent, everyone an epic in the most fundamental sense of the
word. Even among cultures that have not
survived to our time, great works that helped define who these people were live
on – the most fundamental sense of the word.
Even among cultures that have not survived to our time, great works that
helped define who these people were live on – the Mesopotamians with their Gilgamesh, the Romans with their Aeneid, the Maya with their Popol Vuh, to cite just a few
examples. But books not only define
lives, civilizations, and collective identities, they also have the power to
shape events and nudge the course of history, and they do it in countless
ways. Some of them are profoundly obvious,
as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel that, some believe, moved Abraham Lincoln to
remark “caused this great war,” or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an eloquent condemnation of the pesticide DDT issued
in 1962 that questioned sureness of technological progress and ushered in the
environmental protection movement.
“Those
books were read by millions of people, and their impact was immediate. Other books, though read by only a few in
their time – Nicolaus Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial
Spheres) of 1543 being a prime example – were read all the same by an important
few, and thus altered the way humanity views the world, in this case the entire
solar system and the vast universe that contains it. Civil
Disobedience was published in 1866, four years after its author, Henry
David Thoreau, had died at age of forty-four.
The essay had little influence on nineteenth-century thinkers at first,
prompting the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to wonder why Americans paid very
little attention to its thesis, which advocated the principles of passive
resistance. Adherents of this approach
in the twentieth century, though, included Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr.”
--Every
Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World by Nicholas
A. Basbane
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