Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when
adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give
strength to read more

Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when
adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give
strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought
forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which
no mind can calculate. depend upon books.

In you are sent
The types of Truths whose life is The To Come;
In you soars read more

In you are sent
The types of Truths whose life is The To Come;
In you soars up the Adam from the fall;
In you the Future as the Past is given--
Ev'n in our death ye bid us hail our birth;--
Unfold these pages, and behold the Heaven,
Without one grave-stone left upon the Earth.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits--so much help
read more

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits--so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth--
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret room
Piled high with cases in read more

Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret room
Piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning's dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands read more

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books,
exempted from the wrong of time, and capable read more

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books,
exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual
renovation.