"Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time."

Ruskin, John on Books - Reading
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"A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one."

Chambers, Oswald on Books - Reading
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"I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child."

Konrad, George on Writers and Writing
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"Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever."

Swartz, J. on Books - Reading
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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."

Carlyle, Thomas on Books - Reading
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"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that."

Mccosh on Books - Reading
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"I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable -- any real insight or broad human sentiment."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on Translation
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"Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads."

Chesterfield, Lord on Books - Reading
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"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."

Fuentes, Carlos on Books - Reading
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"There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?"

Tsvetaeva, Marina on Books - Reading
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"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

Lowell, Amy on Books - Reading
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"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered."

Thoreau, Henry David on Books - Reading
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"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

Milton, John on Censorship
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"A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books."

Kirk, E.N. on Books - Reading
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"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them."

Wiesel, Elie on Editing and Editors
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"Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired."

Morely, John on Books - Reading
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"The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book -- what everyone else does not say in a book."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on Aphorisms and Epigrams
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"Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need."

Buckingham, Duke of on Books - Reading
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"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

Schopenhauer, Arthur on Books - Reading
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"The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most."

Crane, Frank on Books - Reading
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"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb."

Eco, Umberto on Books - Reading
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"Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before."

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De on Books - Reading
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"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book -- it is a plaything."

Peacock, Thomas Love on Quotations
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"In every fat book there is a thin book trying to get out."

Unknown, Source on Opinions
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"The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all."

Wells, Carolyn on Books - Reading
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"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on Books - Reading
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"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art."

Ruskin, John on Nations
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"There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."

Wilde, Oscar on Books - Reading
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"Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age."

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on Books - Reading
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"There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world."

Joubert, Joseph on Books - Reading
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"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."

Wilde, Oscar on Books - Reading
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"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

Wolfe, Thomas on Books - Reading
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"The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read."

Lincoln, Abraham on Books - Reading
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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."

Benjamin, Walter on Books - Reading
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"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads."

Shaw, George Bernard on Censorship
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"Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense."

Disraeli, Benjamin on Books - Reading
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"Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature"

Moschitta, John on Literature
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"For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. "

Lippmann, Walter on Uncategorised
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"If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid."

Melville, Herman on Censorship
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"Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?"

Foster, John W. on Economy and Economics
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