Great Throughts Treasury

"Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

"The proper study of mankind is books." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning." -

"I learned much from my teachers, more from my books, and most from my troubles." - Isaac ben Abraham Kaminer

"I am happy in having learned to distinguish between ownership and possession. Books, pictures, and all the beauty of the world belong to those who love and understand them - not usually to those who possess them. All of these things that I am entitled to have I have - I own by divine right. So I care not a bit who possesses them." -

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me." - Charles Lamb

"A wise man will select his books, for he would not wish to class them all under the sacred name of friends. Some can be accepted only as acquaintances. The best books of all kinds are taken to the heart, and cherished as his most precious possessions. Others to be chatted with for a time, to spend a few pleasant hours with and laid aside, but not forgotten." - James Alfred Langford

"No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of children of men." - James Alfred Langford

"All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words." - Amy Lowell, born Amy Lawrence Lowell

"Talking is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books." - William Matthews

"Books are read by people who read to find themselves - and who find in books not something bigger than life but something that makes their own lives bigger." -

"Physical science reads through its sense of touch like a blind man, and the supply of books in braille type on the spiritual life is very small." - Austin O'Malley

"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty." - Joseph Parker

"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading. But a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty." - Theodore Parker

"Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen." - Samuel Paterson

"Every person in the world may not become a personage. But every person may become a personality. The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Interesting thoughts can live only in cultivated minds. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays at the theater, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world; and they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others." - William Lyon Phelps

"It is good to respect old thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in which they stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must be given forth every half-century." -

"It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth." -

"There are fashions in immortality as there are trivial fashions. Books and pictures read differently to different generations." - William Rothenstein, fully Sir William Rothenstein

"It is a great mistake of many ardent students that they trust too much to their books, and do not draw from their own resources - forgetting that of all sophists our own reason is that which abuses us least." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Begin by reading thyself rather than books." -

"We should accustom the mind to keep the best company by introducing it only to the best books." - Sydney Smith

"In solitude the mind gains strength, and learns to lean upon herself; in the world it seeks or accepts of a few treacherous supports - the feigned compassion of one, the flattery of a second, the civilities of a third, the friendship of a fourth - they all deceive and bring the mind back to retirement, reflection, and books." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." -

"Temples fall, statues decay, mausoleums perish, eloquent phrases declaimed are forgotten, but good books are immortal." - William Vernon

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations." - Robert Andrews

"The world is the book where eternal Wisdom wrote its own ideas, and the living temple where, depicting its own acts and likeness, it decorated the height and the depth with living statues; so that every spirit, to guard against profanity, should read and contemplate here art and government, and each should say: “I fill the universe, seeing God in all things.” But we, souls bound to books and dead temples, copied with many mistakes from the living, place these things before such instruction. O ills, quarrels, ignorance, labors, pains, make us aware of our falling away: O let us, in God’s name, return to the original." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

"Wherever books are burned, sooner or later men also are burned." - Heinrich Heine

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves." -

"History is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"All books are either dreams or swords. You can cut, or you can drug, with words." -

"The study of books is a languishing and feeble activity that gives no heat, whereas discussion teaches and exercises us at the same time." -

"The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world." - Eugenio Montale

"A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts." -

"We are on the brink of a historic convergence as novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers move toward multiform stories and digital formats; computer scientists move toward the creation of fictional worlds; and the audience moves toward the virtual stage. How can we tell what is coming next? Judging from the current landscape, we can expect a continued loosening of the traditional boundaries between games and stories, between films and rides, between broadcast media (like television and radio) and archival media (like books or videotape, between narrative forms (like books) and dramatic forms (like theater or film), and even between the audience and the author. To understand the new genres and the narrative pleasures that will arise from this heady mixture, we must look beyond the formats imposed upon the computer by the older media it is so rapidly assimilating and identify those properties native to the machine itself." - Janet H. Murray

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Since everything that comes into the human minds enters through the gates of sense, man’s first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"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." -

"It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." - Albert Einstein

"Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone." -

"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice." - Alan Curtis Kay

"Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideals is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path of wisdom is a liberal education." - Alfred Whitney Griswold

"Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators." - Amos Bronson Alcott

"Insist on reading the great books, on marking the great events of the world. Then the little books can take care of themselves, and the trivial incidents of passing politics and diplomacy may perish with the using." - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley

"If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, an time and energy limited." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"To the man who studies to gain a thorough insight into science, books and study are merely the steps of the ladder by which he climbs to the summit; as soon as a step has been advanced he leaves it behind. The majority of mankind, however, who study to fill their memory with facts do not use the steps of the ladder to mount upward, but take them off and lay them on their shoulders in order that they may take them along, delighting in the weight of the burden they are carrying. They ever remain below because they carry what should carry them." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind." - Arthur Schopenhauer