Books & Reading Quotes — page 4

Next in importance to a faithful transfusion of the sense and meaning of an author, is an assimilation of the style and manner of writing in the translation to that of the original.

If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it would be interminable, dreary, commonplace eating and dressing, buttoning, with here and there a patch of vividness. Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is shadows of …

When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

"A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman."

Go through John's Gospel, and study the "believes," the "verilys," the " I ams; "and go through the Bible in that way, and it becomes a new book to you.

The Book it self is so short, that I need not detain the Reader any longer in the Preface...

I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.

The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty — who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause — can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by …

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

His [the author's] renown has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure.

I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote …

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like." I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be …

The atmosphere in literature and art, in novels and dramas, in newspapers and reviews is not only no longer Christian, but is largely anti-Christian, even on the ethical side. If you think of some of the names most honored of late, Thomas …

Surely it is more honourable to do great things, than to speak or read great things!...When a Christian has one eye upon his book, the other should be looking up to heaven for a blessing upon what he reads.

I happened to be impressed by his knowledge of natural history and literature and to have had first-hand evidence of both, but I gather from others that there were other fields of knowledge in which he was also remarkable.

As I ever disclaimed alchemy in the vulgar sense, so I thought fit to let the alchemists know it, lest — in the perusal of my writings — they should fix a construction to some passages which cannot suit with the judgment of their author.

And Rome – oh, the list is endless there, also - most of them were glorified harlots but better be a glorified harlot than a drab and moral drone, such as the text books teach us woman should be.

Reading this morning a tract wrote by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance, that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a law in all our Colonies that …

abuse the World. For whilst such Men are quietly permitted to publish Books

My only consolation has been to read up the history of Ireland in Lecky and our abominable treatment of her. All the faults of the Irish character are traceable to that.

As we live by the Muses, it is but a Gratitude in us to encourage Poetical Merit wherever we find it. The Muses, contrary to all other Ladies, pay no Distinction to Dress, and never partially mistake the Pertness of Embroidery for Wit, nor …

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me to the contrary.