Others

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.

When we sing the blues, we’re singing out our hearts, we’re singing out our feelings. Maybe we’re hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

They’ve laughed to shield their crying then shuffled through the dreams and stepped ’n fetched a country to write the blues with screams.

Beauty is only a promise of happiness.

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

Bait, n . A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short years, no baby is competent to be a joy “forever.”

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.