What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
—Robert Burton, 1621Quotes
We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.
—Virginia Woolf, 1924A maid that laughs is half taken.
—John Ray, 1670He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.
—E. R. Dodds, 1951Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.
—Lucretius, c. 57 BCAfter midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.
—Amelia Earhart, 1935A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1732Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
—Robertson Davies, 1985Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1886Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCTo outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100