Quotes
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The Endless Passion for Books
‘I am haunted by an inexhaustible passion that up to now I have not managed or wanted to quench. I feel that I have never enough books. Books delight one in depth, run through our veins, advise us and bind us in a kind of active and keen familiarity; and an individual book does not…
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The Enchantment of a Great Book
‘It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in paradise again.‘― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Why Gold Is So Hard to Find
‘I see no reason why the electric forces of the earth don’t consolidate gold to an easily accessible spot, from which we might fashion our currency. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you may dig long and find none; you must dig…
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Digging for Gold: Heraclitus on Effort and Reward
‘Gold-seekers dig much earth to find a little gold.‘― Heraclitus
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good luck books
‘Aren’t we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise book seller?‘― Christopher Morley
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The lap of eternity
‘I no sooner come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and Melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and…
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The Infinite Pursuit of Knowledge
‘We see in all other pleasures, there is satiety, and after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, and not the quality. And, therefore, we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy.…
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The Magic of Old Libraries
‘What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon…
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The marvellous existence of bookstores
‘The marvel is, indeed, that the bookseller ever survives at all. It is as if a haberdasher, in addition to meeting all the hazards of the current fashion, had to keep in stock a specimen of every kind of shirt, collar, sock, necktie and undershirt in favour since 1750‘― H. L. Mencken
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