Literature and Words

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

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

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

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack.

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music and silence.

A letter is a soliloquy, but a letter with a postscript is a conversation.

Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

A different language is a different vision of life.