Literature and Words

Language is the dress of thought.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.

Your borrowers of books —those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

The play-bill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

IF BOOKS ARE NOT GOOD COMPANY, WHERE WILL I FIND IT?

A MAN CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH RED WINE, TOO MANY BOOKS, OR TOO MUCH AMMUNITION.

A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline—sharp, clear, whole.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals . . . he seeks to establish a relationship.

The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.

I never saw an author in my life, saving perhaps one, that did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat on having his fur smoothed the right way by a skillful hand.

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.

Eloquence is a painting of thought.