Books Quotes
Samuel Johnson is on this page more than once for good reason. In The Rambler (1750) he wrote that no place gives a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. Boswell (1791) has him saying that a man ought to read just as inclination leads him, because what he reads as a task will do him little good. Alberto Manguel, Emerson and Northrop Frye are among the most-quoted writers here, which is what you would expect from people who spent their working lives reading.
Two entries are flagged as misattributed. The quip about a manuscript that is both good and original, with the good parts not original and the original parts not good, is credited to Johnson. “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” is credited to General Patton.
Resolve to spend a certain number of hours every day amongst your books.
'Tis pleasure, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
It is just thinkable that books may some day be written by machinery....
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
Bookes give no wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.
I guess I should have written two books of my life, one for the adults and another for the kids.
When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty. books.google
I went through every phone book in Africa, and I didn't find one god damned Pryor!