If anything delight me for to print
My book, 'tis this: that Thou, my God, art in't.
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.
Oh, no, no, no! Couldn't think of it. It's a very dangerous book. Had a very bad influence.
An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.
The treatises written in Greek... in Alexandria, are the earliest known books on chemistry.
History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.
Book 5 [...] even knows, in a hymn not suspected as an addition, of the Yamunā.
For me, literature is an incredibly important way of telling the truth.
That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.