Books: Classics

(415 votes)   The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(406 votes)   A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

Chinese Proverb

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(346 votes)   Seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study, and alos by faith.

Doctrine & Covenants

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(282 votes)   Books, books, books 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!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861, British Poet

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(267 votes)   Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(265 votes)   If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.

Thomas Carlyle
1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author

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(263 votes)   A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(260 votes)   Books succeed, and lives fail.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861, British Poet

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(243 votes)   Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.

Dawn Adams

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(236 votes)   Beware of the person of one book.

St. Thomas Aquinas
1225-1274, Italian Scholastic Philosopher and Theologian

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(233 votes)   A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Pablo Neruda
1904-1973, Chilean Poet

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(226 votes)   You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

John Morely

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(225 votes)   Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker
1957-, American Author

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(215 votes)   Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Thomas B. Aldrich
1836-1907, American Writer, Editor

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(207 votes)   To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.

John Aikin

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