Books & Reading Quotes — page 34

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is …

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it …

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing …

When I read the life of such a man as Paul, how I blush to think how sickly and dwarfed Christianity is at the present time, and how many hundreds there are who never think of working for the Son of God and honoring Christ.

Considering how few, and how simple the Principles are, upon which the whole Art of PERSPECTIVE depends, and withal how useful, nay how absolutely necessary this Art is to all forts of Designing; I have often wonder'd, that it has still …

Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none.

Looking back to those times we cannot, without much reading, clearly gauge the sentiment of the Colonies.

Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly; books and colleges at second-hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars: actual contact with the elements, sympathy …

Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate.

In the year 1837, a short paper was read by me before the Geological Society of London, "On the Formation of Mould," in which it was shown that small fragments of burnt marl, cinders, &c., which had been thickly strewed over the surface of …

Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.

Jean Bodin is, next to Machiavelli, the most important political writer of the sixteenth century.

Books may preach when the author cannot, when the author may not, when the author dares not, yes, and which is more, when the author is not.

Books are the greatest and the most satisfactory of recreations. I mean the use of books for pleasure. Without books, without having acquired the power of reading for pleasure, none of us can be independent, but if we can read we have a …

Assay nothing without science, but confine your selves to those bounds, which Nature hath prescribed you. p. 70 (last sentence of the book)

If men are to meet steel with steel, they should be adequately armed. Long spears and short swords to meet a charge of long swords. If you dont believe that, read the chronicles of Rome and Macedonia.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

I shall take leave to think the worse, rather of the practice of the men than of the book of God.

I have not read it, and I don't intend to read it. It's not worth the paper it's written on. To the end of time it'll always be a case of “Thy head or my head.” I've no faith in these schemes.

Whence thy learning? Hath thy toil O'er books consumed the midnight oil?

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —& they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.

'… and as to what may be in this book, do not feel timid nor hesitate to enter. There are more mountains than molehills …'

His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.