On Books       On Parenting On Books A room without books is like a body without a soul. Cicero * * * We grew up with books. I don't think you can write if you don't read. You can't read if you don't think. Thinking, reading, and writing all go together. When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book. Margaret Walker Alexander * * * There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away, Nor any courser like a page of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul! Emily Dickinson * * * If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict. Erasmus * * * Books are my passion, not only writing them and every once in a while even reading them but just having them and moving them around and feeling the comfort of their serene presence. Fred Buechner * * * The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. Aristotle * * * The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. James McCosh * * * A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. Chinese Proverb * * * My library was dukedom large enough. William Shakespeare, from The Tempest * * * He who destroys a good book kills reason itself. John Milton * * * Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. Paxton Hood * * * These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. Gilbert Highet * * * Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book. Charles Kingsley * * * To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life. W. Somerset Maugham * * * A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. Martin Tupper * * * Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Virginia Woolf * * * Literature is my Utopia. Helen Keller * * * What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all. Ralph Waldo Emerson * * * Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. Heinrich Heine * * * Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Samuel Paterson * * * If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. Ralph Waldo Emerson * * * In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. S. I. Hayakawa * * * Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking. Edward Gibbon * * * It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind. Sydney Smith * * * October is crisp days and cool nights, a time to curl up around the dancing flames and sink into a good book. John Sinor * * * The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. Mark Twain * * * A good word is like a good tree whose root is firmly fixed and whose top is in the sky. The Koran * * * Books are the quietest and most constant of friends: they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. Charles W. Eliot * * * A library is a hospital for the mind. Author unknown * * * I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes.... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely. H. G. Wells * * * Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Richard Steele * * * Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. Socrates * * * We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. B. F. Skinner * * * The end of reading is not more books but more life. Holbrook Jackson * * * Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual. Socrates * * * Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. Samuel Taylor Coleridge * * * I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget. William Phelps * * * I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. Malcolm X * * * Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. Mortimer J. Adler * * * Readers may be divided into four classes: 1.) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2.) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3.) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4.) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. Samuel Taylor Coleridge * * * The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity. Thomas Carlyle * * * When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it. Marie de Sevigne * * * The way a book is read -- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book -- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it. Norman Cousins * * * 'Tis the good reader that makes the good book. Ralph Waldo Emerson * * * To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. Edmund Burke * * * When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands. James Burke * * * There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island. Walt Disney * * * The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. Dr. Seuss * * * Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. Horace Mann * * * Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future. Ray Bradbury * * * Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Barbara W. Tuchman * * * The big advantage of a book is it's very easy to rewind. Close it and you're right back at the beginning. Jerry Seinfeld * * * The Reading Mother I had a Mother who read to me Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea, Cutlasses clenched in their yellow teeth, "Blackbirds" stowed in the hold beneath. I had a Mother who read me lays Of ancient and gallant and golden days; Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe, Which every boy has a right to know. I had a Mother who read me tales Of Gelert the hound of the hills of Wales, True to his trust till his tragic death, Faithfulness blent with his final breath. I had a Mother who read me the things That wholesome life to the boy heart brings -- Stories that stir with an upward touch, Oh, that each mother of boys were such! You may have tangible wealth untold; Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be -- I had a Mother who read to me. Strickland Gillilan * * * Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing. Cicero * * * When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. Erasmus * * * From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings. Helen Hayes * * * A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. William Styron * * * A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. Goethe * * * I have found such joy in simple things; A plain clean room , a nut-brown loaf of bread, A cup of milk, a kettle as it sings, The shelter of a roof above my head, And in a leaf-laced square along a floor, Where yellow sunlight glimmers through a door. I have found such joys in things that fill My quiet days: a curtain's blowing grace, A potted plant upon my window sill, A rose fresh-cut and placed within a vase, A table cleared, a lamp beside a chair, And books I long have loved beside me there. Grace Noll Crowell * * * When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before. Clifton Fadiman * * * No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. Lady M. W. Montague * * * Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Francis Bacon * * * To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations; such is a pleasure beyond compare. Kenko Yoshida * * * Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom. George Curtis * * * Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon * * * The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books. Henry W. Longfellow * * * I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel. Charles Finney * * * No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally worth reading at the age of fifty. C. S. Lewis * * * The Bibliomaniac's Prayer Keep me, I pray, in wisdom's way That I may truths eternal seek; I need protecting care to-day, -- My purse is light, my flesh is weak. So banish from my erring heart All baleful appetites and hints Of Satan's fascinating art, Of first editions, and of prints. Direct me in some godly walk Which leads away from bookish strife, That I with pious deed and talk May extra-illustrate my life. But if, O Lord, it pleaseth thee To keep me in temptation's way, I humbly ask that I may be Most notably beset today; Let my temptation be a book, Which I shall purchase, hold, and keep, Whereon when other men shall look, They'll wail to know I got it cheap. Oh, let it such a volume be As in rare copperplates abounds, Large paper, clean, and fair to see, Uncut, unique, unknown to Lowndes. Eugene Fields * * * Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. W. B. Yeats * * * The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, or defence. J. A. Langford * * * Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Henry Ward Beecher * * * You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. Ray Bradbury * * * A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way. Caroline Gordon * * * A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. Robertson Davies * * * I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. C. S. Lewis * * * This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force. Dorothy Parker * * * The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries. Descartes * * * Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. Mark Twain * * * History makes men wise; poetry, witty; mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; literature, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; theology, humble; and each of these taken together makes men a true education of moral philosophy. Francis Bacon * * * The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life. G. K. Chesterton * * * It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. C. S. Lewis * * * If a book is not worth re-reading, it is not worth reading. Samuel Johnson * * * Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure. Edward Thorndike * * * Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. Rudyard Kipling * * * For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. Dorothy Sayers * * * Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx * * * Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore? Henry Ward Beecher * * * I raised my eyes aloft, and I beheld The scattered chapters of the Universe Gathered and bound into a single book By the austere and tender hand of God. Dante Alighieri, from The Divine Comedy * * * In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes. Ralph Waldo Emerson * * * I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges * * * We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. John Naisbitt * * * The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. Theodore Parker * * * The libraries have become my candy store. Juliana Kimball * * * A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. Daniel J. Boorstein * * * I've traveled the world twice over, Met the famous: saints and sinners, Poets and artists, kings and queens, Old stars and hopeful beginners; I've been where no one's been before, Learned secrets from writers and cooks, All with one library ticket To the wonderful world of books. Author Unknown * * * And nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying, "Here is a story book My Father hath writ for thee. Come, wander with me," she said, "In regions yet untrod And read what is still unread In the manuscript of God." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow * * * Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime. Martin Luther Many, many thanks go to my good friend Lauri for creating the beautiful handmade graphic for this page!