After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.
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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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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
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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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I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
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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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We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
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One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
