Others

Where words fail, music speaks.

Where words fail, music speaks.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

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.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.