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
Gardens are not made by sitting in the shade.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
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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)
Freedom lies in being bold.
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
We must not mock God. Yet the best of us are not so much afraid to offend Him as to offend our neighbors, kinsmen, or rulers.
~ in Essays. Bk. 1, Ch. 39
I speak truth not as much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
~ in Essays, Bk. 3, Ch. 1
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.”
~ in Essays, Bk. 3, Ch. 13
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.
~ in “On Some Lines of Virgil”
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
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RELATED CONTENT
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If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
~ Kingsley Amis
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
~Charles Baudelaire
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
~ Robert Benchley
Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
~ Anne Bernays
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
~ Josh Billings
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
~ Gerald Brenan
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
~ Anton Chekhov
Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.
~ Frank Moore Colby
Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
~ Richard Condon
The secret of good writing is to say an old thin in new way or to say a new thing an old way.
~ Richard Harding Davis
Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ Will Durant
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
~ Havelock Ellis
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
~ Epictetus
The desire to write grows with writing.
~ Erasmus
Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
~ Gene Fowler
Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
~ Ernest Hemingway
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
~ William Inge
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
~ Tracy Kidder
I’ve experienced t he pain and joy of hte birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationshiip with those he loves, with the whole world.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet
Though old the thought and oft exprest,
‘Tis his at last who says it best.
~ James Russell Lowell
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
~ George Moore
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
~ John Morley
Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.”
~ Bill Moyers
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
~ Jules Renard
Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Originality is not saying something new, originality is taking the mundane and remaking it afresh.
~ Kevin Stilley
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
~ Logan Pearsall Smith
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~ Red Smith
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
~ William Styron
Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.
~ James Thurber
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
~ Lionel Trilling
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.
~ Mark Twain
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
~ Mark Twain
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
~ Voltaire
Be obscure clearly.
~ E. B. White
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~ Elie Wiesel
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
~ Virginia Woolf
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RELATED
- When Did You Become A Writer
- A Passage For My Writer Friends
- How To Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Deer On A Bicycle, by Patrick McManus
- Master List of Great Quotes
Their Eyes Were Watching God
My first exposure to Zora Neale Hurston’s writing was her book Dust Tracks On A Road
So along the way I acquired two more of Hurston’s books, Mules and Men
I loved the book and highly recommend it to you. If you already own it, move it to the top of your “books-to-be-read” stack. If you don’t own it I recommend that you check it out of your local public library or spend the $10 to purchase it.
Tolle lege!
I share below some quotes from the book:
* * *
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. (page 1)
* * *
“You know if you pass some people and don’t speak tuh suit ‘em dey got tuh go way back in yo’ life and see whut you ever done. They know mo’ ’bout yuh than you do yo’ self. An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened.”
“If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout ‘em then Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass.”
“Ah hears what they say ’cause they just will collect round mah porch ’cause it’s on de big road. Mah husband git so sick of ‘em sometime he makes ‘em all git for home.”
“Sam is right too. They just wearin’ out yo’ sittin’ chairs.”
“Yeah, Sam say most of ‘em goes to church so they’ll be sure to rise in Judgment. Dat’s de day dat every secret is s’posed to be made known. They wants to be there and hear it all.”
“Sam is too crazy! You can’t stop laughin’ when youse around him.”
“Uuh hunh. He says he aims to be there hisself so he can find out who stole his corn-cob pipe.” (pages 6-7)
* * *
They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity, Janie full of that oldest human longing–self-revelation. (page 8 )
* * *
The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town mind. She couldn’t get but so close to most of them in spirit. (page 55)
* * *
There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said “Our beloved Mayor,” it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like “God is everywhere.” It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with. (page 57)
* * *
When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made if even nicer to listen to. (page 60)
* * *
“Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. i god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.”
“Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!”
“Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinkin’. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.” (pages 83-84)
* * *
“He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it….So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. (page 84)
* * *
She got so she received all things with the stolidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference. (page 91)
____________
RELATED CONTENT
- Thoughts About Dust Tracks On A Road
- Zora Neale Hurston – Select Quotes
- Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis
- Index to Great Quotes
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She got so she received all things with the stolidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference.
~ From Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
~ From Their Eyes Were Watching God
There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said “Our beloved Mayor,” it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like “God is everywhere.” It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with.
~ From Their Eyes Were Watching God
When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made if even nicer to listen to.
~ From Their Eyes Were Watching God
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
- 2008 – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
- 2007 – Doris Lessing
- 2006 – Orhan Pamuk
- 2005 – Harold Pinter
- 2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
- 2003 – J. M. Coetzee
- 2002 – Imre Kertész
- 2001 – V. S. Naipaul
- 2000 – Gao Xingjian
- 1999 – Günter Grass
- 1998 – José Saramago
- 1997 – Dario Fo
- 1996 – Wislawa Szymborska
- 1995 – Seamus Heaney
- 1994 – Kenzaburo Oe
- 1993 – Toni Morrison
- 1992 – Derek Walcott
- 1991 – Nadine Gordimer
- 1990 – Octavio Paz
- 1989 – Camilo José Cela
- 1988 – Naguib Mahfouz
- 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
- 1986 – Wole Soyinka
- 1985 – Claude Simon
- 1984 – Jaroslav Seifert
- 1983 – William Golding
- 1982 – Gabriel García Márquez
- 1981 – Elias Canetti
- 1980 – Czeslaw Milosz
- 1979 – Odysseus Elytis
- 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1977 – Vicente Aleixandre
- 1976 – Saul Bellow
- 1975 – Eugenio Montale
- 1974 – Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
- 1973 – Patrick White
- 1972 – Heinrich Böll
- 1971 – Pablo Neruda
- 1970 – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
- 1969 – Samuel Beckett
- 1968 – Yasunari Kawabata
- 1967 – Miguel Angel Asturias
- 1966 – Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
- 1965 – Mikhail Sholokhov
- 1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre
- 1963 – Giorgos Seferis
- 1962 – John Steinbeck
- 1961 – Ivo Andric
- 1960 – Saint-John Perse
- 1959 – Salvatore Quasimodo
- 1958 – Boris Pasternak
- 1957 – Albert Camus
- 1956 – Juan Ramón Jiménez
- 1955 – Halldór Laxness
- 1954 – Ernest Hemingway
- 1953 – Winston Churchill
- 1952 – François Mauriac
- 1951 – Pär Lagerkvist
- 1950 – Bertrand Russell
- 1949 – William Faulkner
- 1948 – T.S. Eliot
- 1947 – André Gide
- 1946 – Hermann Hesse
- 1945 – Gabriela Mistral
- 1944 – Johannes V. Jensen
- 1943 – The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1942 – The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1941 – The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1940 – The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1939 – Frans Eemil Sillanpää
- 1938 – Pearl Buck
- 1937 – Roger Martin du Gard
- 1936 – Eugene O’Neill
- 1935 – The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1934 – Luigi Pirandello
- 1933 – Ivan Bunin
- 1932 – John Galsworthy
- 1931 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt
- 1930 – Sinclair Lewis
- 1929 – Thomas Mann
- 1928 – Sigrid Undset
- 1927 – Henri Bergson
- 1926 – Grazia Deledda
- 1925 – George Bernard Shaw
- 1924 – Wladyslaw Reymont
- 1923 – William Butler Yeats
- 1922 – Jacinto Benavente
- 1921 – Anatole France
- 1920 – Knut Hamsun
- 1919 – Carl Spitteler
- 1918 – The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1917 – Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
- 1916 – Verner von Heidenstam
- 1915 – Romain Rolland
- 1914 – The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
- 1913 – Rabindranath Tagore
- 1912 – Gerhart Hauptmann
- 1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck
- 1910 – Paul Heyse
- 1909 – Selma Lagerlöf
- 1908 – Rudolf Eucken
- 1907 – Rudyard Kipling
- 1906 – Giosuè Carducci
- 1905 – Henryk Sienkiewicz
- 1904 – Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
- 1903 – Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
- 1902 – Theodor Mommsen
- 1901 – Sully Prudhomme
