Literature and Words

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A different language is a different vision of life.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

It seems to me that many fall into it even against their will, and fancy they are discussing, when they are merely debating, because they cannot distinguish the meanings of a term, in their investigation of any question, but carry on their opposition to what is stated, by attacking the mere words, employing the art of debate, and not that of philosophical discussion.

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.