Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
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The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
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To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
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A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
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Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.
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We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
