This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Some books leave us free and some books make us free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer are - (1) Never read any book that is not a year old. (2) Never read any but the famed books (3) Never read any but what you like." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The three practical rules... 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Books are for the scholars’ times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must – we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duties to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Reading good books is like having a conversation with the highly worthy persons of the past who wrote them; indeed, it is like having a prepared conversation in which those persons disclose to us only their best thinking." - René Descartes
"The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in why they revel to us none but the best of their thoughts." - René Descartes
"You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which; you will never learn from masters." - Saint Bernard of Clairvaux NULL
"Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it." -
"The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written." - William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books." - Thomas Carlyle
"Books are a triviality. Life alone is great." - Thomas Carlyle
"Learning hath gained most by those books by which printers have lost." - Thomas Fuller
"Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. To much overcharges nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. It is thought, and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind." - Thomas Fuller
"It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"A word as to the education of the heart: We don't believe that this can be imparted through books; it can only be imparted through the loving touch of the teacher." - César Chávez, fully César Estrada Chávez
"What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books! - If you bring to it not the obligation of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer!" - David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker
"Other books we may read and criticise. To the Scriptures we must bow the entire soul, with all its faculties." - Edward N. Kirk, fully Edward Needles Kirk
"Today, with the abundance of books available, it is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read. … Feed only on the best" - Ezra Taft Benson
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." - Francis Bacon
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?" - Franz Kafka
"Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories." - Graham Greene
"If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures."" - Harry Allen Overstreet
"Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought. " - Harry S. Truman
"We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
"It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old." - James Henry Leigh Hunt
"It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality." - Jeremy Rifkin
"Experience demonstrates that of any number of children of equal intellectual powers, those who receive no particular care in infancy, and who do not begin to study till the constitution begins to be consolidated, but who enjoy the benefit of a good physical education, very soon surpass in their studies those who commenced earlier, and who read numerous books when very young." - Johann Spurzheim, fully Johann Gaspar Spurzheim or Kaspar or Caspar
"Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. " - Joseph Priestley
"Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we ... can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health... the punitive attitude persists. And just so long as the spirit of vengeance has the slightest vestige of respectability, so long as it pervades the public mind and infuses its evil upon the statute books of the law, we will make no headway toward the control of crime. We cannot assess the most appropriate and effective penalties so long as we seek to inflict retaliatory pain. " - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"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." - Lance Morrow
"The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the Gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality." - Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym for Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"In the end, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and those you love and work hard. Work like there's no tomorrow. Train. Strive. Really train and cultivate your talent to the highest degree. Be the best at what you do. Get to know more about your field than anybody alive. Use the tools of your trade, if it's books or a floor to dance on or a body of water to swim in. Whatever it is, it's yours. That's what I've always tried to remember." - Michael Jackson, fully Michael Joseph Jackson, aka MJ or King of Pop
"The study of books is a languishing and feeble activity that gives no heat, whereas discussion teaches and exercises us at the same time." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think." - Michel Foucault
"There is nothing more difficult, than to please all People, not more easie and common than to censure Books that come abroad in the World. All Books, without exception, that see the light, run the common Risk of both these inconveniences, though they may be sheltered under the most sublime Protection, what will become of this little Book then, which hath no Patronage? The Subject whereof being mystical, and not well-seasoned; carries along with it the common censure, and will seem insipid? Kind Reader, if you understand it not, be not therefore apt to censure the same. The Natural Man may hear and read these Spiritual Matters, but he can never comprehend them." - Miguel de Molinos
"When I realize everything’s equality I forget all about my close friends and my relatives It’s OK to forget the objects of your attachment. When I realize wisdom beyond thought I forget everything included in perceiver and perceived It’s OK to forget these causes of happiness and pain. Beyond memory, beyond feelings I forget all about experiences, the good ones and the bad It’s OK to forget them, they just go up and down. When I know the three kayas are present naturally I forget all about the deity’s generation stage practice It’s OK to forget the Dharma made of concepts. When I realize the result’s inside of me I forget all about the results you have to strive and strain to get It’s OK to forget the Dharma of the relative truth. Meditating on the key instructions I forget all other explanations and their conventional terms It’s OK to forget the Dharma that makes you arrogant. When I realize appearances are my texts I forget all about those big books with their letters in black It’s OK to forget the Dharma that’s just a heavy load." - Milarepa, fully Jetsun Milarepa NULL
"At different ages for any of us content books will be different." - Milorad Pavić
"Why has there been so great a shift in the attitudes of the public [toward accepting free market ideas]? I’m sorry to confess that I do not believe it occurred because of the persuasive power of such books as Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged or our own Capitalism and Freedom. Such books certainly played a role, but I believe the major reason for the change is the extraordinary force of factual evidence.…The great hopes that had been placed in Russia and China by the collectivists and socialists turned into ashes.…Similarly, the hopes that were placed in Fabian socialism and the welfare state in Britain or the New Deal in the United States were disappointed. One major government program after another started with the very best aims and with noble objectives and turned out not to deliver the goods.…Ideas played their part. But they played their part not by producing a reaction against the spread of government but by determining the form that that reaction took. The role we play as intellectuals is not to persuade anybody but to keep options open and to provide alternative policies that can be adopted when people decide they have to make a change." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman