Others

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory . . . so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

The warehouse of that memory is called the library.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

Jazz is the music of the body.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

An idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.

One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

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

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash— the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

An ignorance of means may minister To greatness, but an ignorance of aims Makes it impossible to be great at all.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Happiness . . . is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.