There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Books are for the scholars’ idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must – we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps […]
I am filling my house with books which I am bound to read, and wondering whether the new heavens which await the soul (after the fatal hour) will allow the consultation of these.
Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, […]
I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River […]
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane, – “Be bold”; and on the second gate, – “Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold”; and then again had paused well at the third gate, – “Be not too bold.”
