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Medicine for the soul.
Author: Unattributed Author
Source: Diodorus Siculus (I, 49, 3), inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes
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Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind,
which are delivered down from generation to generation, as
presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Author: Joseph Addison
Source: in the "Spectator", no. 166
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That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed
with profit.
Author: Amos Bronson Alcott
Source: Table Talk (bk. I, Learning-Books)
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A man of one book.
[Lat., Homo unius libri.]
Author: Amos Bronson Alcott
Source: Table Talk (bk. I, Learning-Books)
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Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when
adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give
strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought
forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which
no mind can calculate. depend upon books.
Author: Richard Aungervyle (Aungerville) (a/k/a Richard de Bury)
Source: Philobiblon (ch. I)
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You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of
the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked
are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees
knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.
Author: Richard Aungervyle (Aungerville) (a/k/a Richard de Bury)
Source: Philobiblon (ch. XV)
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But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books,
exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual
renovation.
Author: Francis Bacon
Source: Advancement of Learning (bk. I, Advantages of Learning)
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few
to be chewed and digested.
Author: Francis Bacon
Source: Essay--Of Studies
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Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
Author: Francis Bacon
Source: Proposition touching Amendment of Laws
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Worthy books
Are not companions--they are solitudes:
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
Author: Philip James Bailey
Source: Festus (sc. A Village Feast, Evening)
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That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues.
Author: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
Source: The Elder Brother (act I, sc. 2, l. 177)
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And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many
books there is no end: and much study is a weariness of the
flesh.
Author: Bible
Source: Ecclesiastes (ch. XII, v. 12)
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Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book,
that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.
Author: Bible
Source: Isaiah (ch. XXX, v. 8)
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Oh that my words were now written! on that they were printed in
a book!
Author: Bible
Source: Job (ch. XIX, v. 23)
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Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the
Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a
book.
Author: Bible
Source: Job (ch. XXXI, v. 35)
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The covers of this book are too far apart.
Author: Bible
Source: Job (ch. XXXI, v. 35)
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We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits--so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth--
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Source: Aurora Leigh (bk. I, l. 700)
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Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret room
Piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning's dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Source: Aurora Leigh (bk. I, l. 830)
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Laws die, Books never.
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: Richelieu (act I, sc. 2)
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Hark, the world so loud,
And they, the movers of the world, so still!
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 3, l. 14)
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We call some books immortal! Do they live?
If so, believe me, Time hath made them pure.
In Books, the veriest wicked rest in peace.
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 3, l. 22)
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The Wise
(Minstrel or Sage,) out of their books are clay;
But in their books, as from their graves they rise.
Angels--that, side by side, upon our way,
Walk with and warn us!
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 3, l. 9)
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All books grow homilies by time; they are
Temples, at once, and Landmarks.
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 4, l. 1)
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There is no Past, so long as Books shall live!
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 4, l. 9)
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In you are sent
The types of Truths whose life is The To Come;
In you soars up the Adam from the fall;
In you the Future as the Past is given--
Ev'n in our death ye bid us hail our birth;--
Unfold these pages, and behold the Heaven,
Without one grave-stone left upon the Earth.
Author: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Source: The Souls of Books (st. 5, l. 11)
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The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source: None
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Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Source: None
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Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Author: Ezra Pound
Source: None
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That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
Author: A. Bronson Alcott
Source: None
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He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.
Author: C. C. Colton
Source: None
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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Source: None
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Books are the quietest and most constant of friends and the most patient of teachers.
Author: Charles W. Eliot
Source: None
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One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.
Author: Lance Morrow
Source: None
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The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: None
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My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
Author: Dylan Thomas
Source: None
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For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Author: Amy Lowell
Source: None
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Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Author: Groucho Marx
Source: None
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Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.
Author: Thomas Fuller
Source: None
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I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
Author: Isaac Asimov
Source: None
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The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
Author: Sir James M. Barrie
Source: None
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A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
Author: Albert Camus
Source: None
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Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
Author: Robert Chambers
Source: None
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The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
Author: Warren Chappell
Source: None
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The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
Author: Frank Dane
Source: None
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I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
Author: John Dawkins
Source: None
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Never judge a book by its movie.
Author: J. W. Eagan
Source: None
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The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Source: None
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Author: John Harington
Source: None
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The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Source: None
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The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul."
Author: Paxton Hood
Source: None
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