Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

I love books.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.

Never judge a book by its movie.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.