Speech is great, but silence is greater.
~ in Past and Present
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,
~ in”The Opera”, Necessity and Free Will
In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. Read more
Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
~ Joseph Addison
Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
~ W. H. Auden
Reading maketh a full man.
~ Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, other to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested.
~ Francis Bacon
He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
~ Isaac Barrow
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky
Reader, If it be not strong upon thy heart to practise what thou readest, to what end dost thou read? To increase thy own condemnation? If thy light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing man thou art, the more miserable man thou wilt be in the day of recompense; thy light and knowledge will more torment thee than all the devils in hell. Thy knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash thee, and that scorpion that will for ever bite thee, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw thee; therefore read, and labour to know, that thou mayest do, or else thou art undone for ever. When Demosthenes was asked, what was the first part of an orator, what the second, what the third? he answered, Action; the same may I say. If any should ask me, what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian? I must answer, Action; as that man that reads that he may know, and that labours to know that he may do, will have two heavens — a heaven of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and a heaven of glory and happiness after death.
~ Thomas Brooks, in Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks, Banner of Truth, 1652 p. 22
Books we must have though we lack bread.
~ Alice Brotherton
A good book is never exhausted. It oges on whispering to you from the wall.
~ Anatole Broyard
Laws die; books never.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
~ Anthony Burgess
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
~ Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
~ Italo Calvino
Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
~ Henry Seidel Canby
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle
In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle
He gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances that a-nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus he sleeping little and reading much the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that degree that at last he lost the use of his reason.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in Don Quixote
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
~ William E. Channing
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb
The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
~ Chines proverb
“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquanintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
~ Winston Churchill
Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.
~ Cicero
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Cicero
The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
~ Tom Clancy
A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
~ Henry T. Coutts
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
~ Hart Crane
Literature is man’s exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
~ David Daiches
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
~ Rene Descartes
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
~ Charles Dickens
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of Prancing Poetry.
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
~ Emily Dickinson
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
~ Michael Dirda
I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
~ Marguerite Duras
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, the most patient teachers.
~ Charles Eliot
A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience”
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Scholar
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. My luggage is my library. My home is where my books are.
~ Desiderius Erasmus
There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
~ Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
~ Clifton Fadiman
If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the Empire were laid at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
~ Francois Fenelon
But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!
~ Eugene Field in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
~ Gustave Flaubert
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
~ Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary
Read in order to Live.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
~ Anatole France
There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
~ Anatole France
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
~ William Gladstone
I have always suspected that authors lie about the books they read, their purported influences, much as men lie about their sex lives; they are at once ashamed and vain, reluctant to be judged, hiding behind a safe parapet like Joyce and Proust and Kafka.
~ Brian Glanville
The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula Le Guin
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it ives you moral knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick
What is a book? Part matter and part spirit; par thing and part thought–however you look at it, if defies definition.
~ Ernest O. Hauser
All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.
~ Ernest Hemingway
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
~ Gilbert Highet
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
~ S.I. Hiyakawa
Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
~ Horace as quoted by Montaigne
Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not escape from my own life and problems. It is escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me.
~ Gladys Hunt, in Honey for a Woman’s Heart (HT: Heidi)
Every man who knows how to read has it in him power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
~ Aldous Huxley
Farther than arrows, higher than wings fly poet’s song and prophet’s words.
~ Inscription on the Brooklyn Public Library
Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.
~ Inscription in the Detroit Public Library
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ Inscription in the New York Public Library.
Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library
People who don’t read are brutes.
~ Eugene Ionesco
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I cannot live without books.
~ Thomas Jefferson
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ Joseph Joubert
A reader finds little in a book save what he puts here. But in a great book he finds space to put many things.
~ Joseph Joubert
A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
~ Franz Kafka
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
~ Garrison Keillor
As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I’ve gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
~Garrison Keillor
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~ Helen Keller
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.
~ John F. Kennedy
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”–the norms of human action.
~ Russell Kirk, in Enemies of the Permanent Things. LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984. page 41
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
~ Charles Lamb
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
~ Charles Lamb
Magazines all too frequently lead to books, and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
~ Fran Lebowitz
Any kid who has parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
~ Sam Levenson
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~ C. S. Lewis
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, read and reviewed by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell
The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
~ Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, April 11, 1868
Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton
What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”
There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley, in The Haunted Bookshop
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris
Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson
I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
~ William Lyon Phelps
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman
People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin
The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell
All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg
The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
~ Carl Sandburg, from his poem “For You”, in Harvest Poems: 1910-1960
The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca
It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer
No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron
My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson
Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau, in Reading
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber
Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.
If you’re going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it’s well furnished.
~ Peter Ustinov
You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
~ Stephen Vizinczey
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from out neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
~ Voltaire
Books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language; the others do not matter.
~ Voltaire
A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
~ Bernard de Voto
I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
~ Simone Weil
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E.P. Whipple
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White
Comerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.
~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
~ Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray
A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure–the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.
~ Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
~ Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting”
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
~ Virginia Woolf
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar
What are the things in your life that invest you with energy and the things that suck it from the marrow of your bones? We all have our own personal lists. Consider this example: For my father, reaching out and caring for others going through times of difficulty was something on which he thrived. It made him more alive. It pumped him full of energy. I find myself fulfilling a similar role as my father that involves coming alongside people during difficult times. However, for me to feel the pain and anguish of others takes a heavy toll on mind and body.
Similarly, business meetings can be very exciting for some people as they share ideas, plan, and envision greater achievements. For others, business meetings are the bane of their existence.
Public speaking, time with family, television, yard work, ….. For some these are energy producers, for others they consume resources directly from the soul.
It behooves us all to consider the elements of our lives and determine what it is that makes us feel more alive and what doesn’t. And, I think it would be wrong to assign moral significance to this list. The fact that you are drained by being in front of people, does not mean that you are a bad leader. Being personally overwhelmed by the burdens and cares of others does not mean you are immature or uncaring. In fact, it may mean just the opposite; that you are so present in the situation that you cannot detach yourself from it.
So, create your lists. What are the things that enliven you? Golf, teaching, discussions with friends, poetry, ebooks, a good sermon . . . Now, what are the things that add weight to your soul? Traffic, watching the news, email, cartoons . . .
Just because something is on “list one” does not necessarily make it a priority. And, just because something is on “list two” does not mean we should refrain from engaging in it. However, thoughtful consideration of the elements of our lives can definitely help us to live a more balanced and fulfilled life.
Your list will not be the same as that of anyone else. You are unique.
For me, bookstores are the most energizing environment in the world. To walk through the doors, smell the print, see the rows upon rows and stacks upon stacks of printed matter is more invigorating than are anabolic steroids for players in Major League Baseball. Knowing that between the covers of the books on the shelves lies all the greatest ideas in the history of mankind, knowing that most great men can date turning points in their lives to the reading of particular books, knowing that only feet away from where I stand are concealed truths I have not yet thought … There aren’t words to describe the experience.
And, of course, Borders is my favorite bookshop in world. While reading Sven Birkerts’ book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age I came across the following quote which describes the invigorating quality to his experience as an employee of Borders.
“My whole relation to books was changed again. All contemplative distance was shattered. I was not there to thumb through offbeat volumes–I was stacking and sorting the brand-new stuff. Everything was glossy and crisp. And, I thought, cutting-edge. I felt as if everyone were just waking up to books as I was. Suddenly there were thousands of serious readers in town. They thronged the aisles of the store, asked questions, placed orders. The books had an aura, an excitement about them. And just moving the titles back and forth, getting them onto the shelves and into the hands of customers was an education. For the first time I caught a sense of what a genuine intellectual life might be like. This was a sense I had never had in college, no matter how challenging a given course may have been. That was packaged thought, with everything already subjected to institutional dry-cleaning. This was different; this was hands-on. I saw my role as quasi-priestly: I was channeling the nourishing word to the people who wanted it most.”
Let me encourage you to find time today to do at least one item from your “list one”. Me? I’m on my way to Borders to drink a cup of coffee and browse the shelves for something I have not yet conceived.
I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being–that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
~ in Harper Magazine, Sept. 1899
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
~ in the New York Tribune, Sept. 27, 1871
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time his is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.”
~ in Letters from the Earth
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
~ in Following the Equator
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you: the one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
~ in Following the Equator
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
~ in Following the Equator
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
~ in The Diaries of Adam and Eve
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
~ quoted by Frank Luntz in Words That Work
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
It’s easy to give up smoking; I’ve done it many times.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Man is the only blushing animal—and the only one that needs to.
__________
Bibliography
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant (1868)
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (1868)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Memoranda (1870-1871)
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
Sketches New and Old (1875)
Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (1876)
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
The Invalid’s Story (1877)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (1878)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The American Claimant (1892)
Merry Tales (1892)
Those Extraordinary Twins (1892)
The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
How to Tell a Story and other Essays (1897)
Following the Equator (1897)
Is He Dead? (1898)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)
A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (1900)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (1901)
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (1901)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
A Dog’s Tale (1904)
Extracts from Adam’s Diary (1904)
King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)
The War Prayer (1905)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
What Is Man? (1906)
Eve’s Diary (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
A Horse’s Tale (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1907)
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)
Letters from the Earth (1909)
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (1910)
My Platonic Sweetheart (1912)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935)
Letters from the Earth (1962)
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969)
Concerning the Jews (1985)
Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (1992)
The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (1995)
To Kill A Mockingbird
I recently read To Kill A Mockingbird
* * *
…but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.
~ The character Scout Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird
“You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of –oh, of your father.”
~ The character Miss Maudie Atkinson, in To Kill A Mockingbird
“Were you playing cards?”
Jem fielded Dill’s fly with his eyes shut: “No sir, just with matches.”
I admired my brother. Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal.
~ The character Scout Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird
For reasons unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year. We had two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885, Atticus said. Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.
~ The character Scout Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
~ The character Atticus, in To Kill A Mockingbird
I wanted you to see something about her–I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
~ The character Atticus, in To Kill A Mockingbird
To all parties present and participating in the life of the county, Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn.
~ The character Scout Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird
Atticus was proceeding amiably, as if he were involved in a title dispute. With his infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas, he could make a rape case as dry as a sermon.
~ The character Scout Finch, in To Kill A Mockingbird
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
~ the character Atticus
As you grow older you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it— whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, of how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
~ the character Atticus
It’s not okay to hate anybody.
~ the character Atticus
Jem see if you can stand in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I’d rather it be me than that household full of children out there.
~ the character Atticus
* * *
And, there was the passage from the book that I shared HERE.
* * *
Some of you may remember that To Kill A Mockingbird
Other books in the top ten are shown below.
A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.
~ September 30, 1859 – Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society
All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.
~ September 7, 1864 – Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — “I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.” To provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
~ Letter, while US Congressman, to his friend and law-partner William H. Herndon, opposing the Mexican-American War, 15 February 1848
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
~ Letter to Isham Reavis, 5 November 1855
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
~ Letter to longtime friend and slave-holder Joshua F. Speed, 24 August 1855
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, (August 1, 1858), p. 532.
I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. … And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
~ Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 18 September 1858
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
~ Letter to Allen N. Ford, 11 August 1846, quoted in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, by Roy Prentice Basler
I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.
~ Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 18 September 1858
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
~ From the first debate with Stephen Douglas in the Lincon-Douglas debates of the 1858 campaign for the US Senate, at Ottawa, Illinois, 21 August 1858, and later repeated in his first Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861
I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses while crossing streams’.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VII, “Reply to Delegation from the National Union League” (June 9, 1864), p. 384.
I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.
~ Letter to Mrs. Orville H. Browning, 1 April 1838
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, “Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin” (September 30, 1859), pp. 481-482.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume V, “Letter to Horace Greeley” (August 22, 1862), p. 388.
On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self evident lie.
~ August 15, 1855 – Letter to George Robertson
The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
~ Letter to Joseph Gillespie, 13 July 1849
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.
~ Speech in the House of Representatives, 20 June 1848
The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.
~ Letter to William H Herndon, 10 July 1848
There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.
~ Herndon’s Life of Lincoln by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik (New York, Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 354.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.
~ Speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
~ Letter to Henry L Pierce, 6 April 1859
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.
~ Communication to the people of Sangamo County, 9 March 1832)
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
~ Lincoln’s Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
~ from his Second Inaugural Address
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
~ From the first debate with Stephen Douglas Ottawa, Illinois, 21 August 1858
A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Avoid popularity if you would have peace.
Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.
Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.
Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Knavery and flattery are blood relations.
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.
Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.
No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.
Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
__________
Click on image
__________
RELATED POSTS
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- Search For A Great President
- Leadership – Select Quotes
I love to hear about the books that others are reading. Have one to share?
It is also intriguing to look at what books (music, etc.) people buy from Amazon after clicking through from this website. I always discover some really cool stuff by browsing the results. Check it out — the following are items that since April people have purchased from Amazon after clicking through from KevinStilley.com.
First, a few thoughts about the list:
- I reviewed Len Sweet’s book So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church
indicating that it was horrible and recommending that no one waste their time on such gibberish. After which, someone clicked through from my review and purchased the book. I guess they showed me!
- Several of my favorite books show up on this list, including Quo Vadis
.
- The list includes some excellent exegetical and theological reference works such as A Theology of the New Testament
and Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary
and the ESV Study Bible.
And, now for the list . . .
BOOKS
- 100 Most Important Events in Christian History, The
- 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged
- A Theology of the New Testament
- A Time of Departing
- After the Locusts: Restoring Ruined Dreams, Reclaiming Wasted Years
- Awareness
- Be Confident (Hebrews): Live by Faith, Not by Sight (The BE Series Commentary)
- Be Mature (James): Growing Up in Christ (The BE Series Commentary)
- Be Rich (Ephesians): Gaining the Things That Money Can’t Buy (The BE Series Commentary)
- Dear and Glorious Physician, A Novel about Saint Luke
- Deceived on Purpose
- ESV Study Bible (Black)
- Eldership in Action: Through Biblical Governance of the Church
- Electrical Power Systems Quality
- Encountering God in the Psalms
- Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary
- Fundamentals Of Electric Power Quality
- Halley’s Bible Handbook with the New International VersionDeluxe Edition
- Humor: The Magic of Genie
- Is Sex Necessary?: Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (Harper colophon books)
- Journey to the End of the Night
- Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter
- Mayberry Humor Across the U. S. A.
- Pensees (Penguin Classics)
- Quo Vadis
- So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church
- Social Justice & the Christian Church
- Taking Back the United Methodist Church
- The Emergent Church- Undefining Christianity
- The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age
- The Heart of the Artist
- The Huguenots: Fighters for God and human freedom
- The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
- The Last Books of H.G. Wells: The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life & Mind at the End of its Tether
- The Letter to the Ephesians (Pillar New Testament Commentary)
- The Liberated Imagination: Thinking Christianly About the Arts (Wheaton Literary Series)
- The Lost Symbol
- The Mentor’s Guide to Biblical Eldership: Twelve Lessons for Mentoring Men to Eldership
- The New Interpreter’s Bible: Kings – Judith (Volume 3)
- The New Interpreter’s Bible: Numbers – Samuel (Volume 2)
- The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible: Large Print Edition
- The Prophet
- The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition : A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
- The Shack
- The Silver Chalice (Loyola Classic)
- The Unity Factor
- Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts
- Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity
- West with the Night
- Wiersbe’s Expository Outline on the New Testament (Warren Wiersbe)
KINDLE EBOOKS
MP3 DOWNLOADS
DVD, ELECTRONICS & MISCELLANEOUS
* * * * *
Do you have thoughts on any of the above items?
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Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not wish to sign.
~ in Le Jardin d’ epicure
To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.
~ in La Revotle des anges
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
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The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that files feels the attraction of earth.
