The World's Best Books : A Key to the Treasures of Literature Part 28

"The Wise (Minstrel or Sage) _out_ of their books are clay; But _in_ their books, as from their graves, they rise, Angels--that, side by side, upon our way, Walk with and warn us!"

"We call some books immortal! _Do they live?_ If so, believe me, TIME hath made them pure.

In Books the veriest wicked rest in peace,-- G.o.d wills that nothing evil should endure; The grosser parts fly off and leave the whole, As the dust leaves the disembodied soul!"

=Macaulay=. "A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers."

=Milton=. "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, G.o.d's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself,--kills the image of G.o.d, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond."

=Montaigne=. "To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, 'tis but to run to my books."

"As to what concerns my other reading, that mixes a little more profit with the pleasure, and from whence I learn how to marshal my opinions and qualities, the books that serve me to this purpose are Plutarch and Seneca,--both of which have this great convenience suited to my humor, that the knowledge I seek is discoursed in loose pieces that do not engage me in any great trouble of reading long, of which I am impatient.... Plutarch is frank throughout. Seneca abounds with brisk touches and sallies. Plutarch, with things that heat and move you more; this contents and pays you better. As to Cicero, those of his works that are most useful to my design are they that treat of philosophy, especially moral; but boldly to confess the truth, his way of writing, and that of all other long-winded authors, appears to me very tedious."

=Morley, John=. "The consolation of reading is not futile nor imaginary.

It is no chimera of the recluse or the bookworm, but a potent reality.

As a stimulus to flagging energies, as an inspirer of lofty aim, literature stands unrivalled."

=Morris, William=. "The greater part of the Latins I should call _sham_ cla.s.sics. I suppose that they have some good literary qualities; but I cannot help thinking that it is difficult to find out how much. I suspect superst.i.tion and authority have influenced our estimate of them till it has become a mere matter of convention. Of modern fiction, I should like to say here that I yield to no one, not even Ruskin, in my love and admiration for Scott; also that, to my mind, of the novelists of our generation, d.i.c.kens is immeasurably ahead."

=Muller, Max=. "I know few books, if any, which I should call good from beginning to end. Take the greatest poet of antiquity, and if I am to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I must say that there are long pa.s.sages, even in Homer, which seem to me extremely tedious."

=Parker, Theodore=. "What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty, as in summer the meadow into gra.s.s and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.... The books which help you most are those which make you think most.... A great book ... is a s.h.i.+p of thought deep freighted with thought, with beauty too. It sails the ocean, driven by the winds of heaven, breaking the level sea of life into beauty where it goes, leaving behind it a train of sparkling loveliness, widening as the s.h.i.+p goes on. And what treasures it brings to every land, scattering the seeds of truth, justice, love, and piety, to bless the world in ages yet to come."

=Peacham, Henry=. "To desire to have many books and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping."

=Petrarch=. "I have friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages and of every country. They have distinguished themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them, for they are always at my service; and I admit them to my company and dismiss them from it whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of Nature.

Some teach me how to live, and others how to die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my spirits; while others give fort.i.tude to my mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires and to depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in all emergencies."

=Phelps, E. J=. (United States Minister to the Court of St. James). "I cannot think the _finis et fructus_ of liberal reading is reached by him who has not obtained in the best writings of our English tongue the generous acquaintance that ripens into affection. If he must stint himself, let him save elsewhere."

=Plato=. "Books are the immortal sons deifying their sires."

=Plutarch=. "We ought to regard books as we do sweetmeats,--not wholly to aim at the pleasantest, but chiefly to respect the wholesomest."

=Potter, Dr=. "It is nearly an axiom that people will not be better than the books they read."

=Raleigh, Walter=. "We may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal, by the comparison and application of other men's fore-pa.s.sed miseries with our own like errors and ill-deservings."

=Richardson, C. F=. "No book, indeed, is of universal value and appropriateness.... Here, as in every other question involved in the choice of books, the golden key to knowledge, a key that will only fit its own proper doors, is _purpose_."

=Ruskin=. "All books are divisible into two cla.s.ses,--the books of the hour and the books of all time." Books of the hour, though useful, are, "strictly speaking, not books at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print," and should not be allowed "to usurp the place of true books."

"Of all the plagues that afflict mortality, the venom of a bad book to weak people, and the charms of a foolish one to simple people, are without question the deadliest; and they are so far from being redeemed by the too imperfect work of the best writers, that I never would wish to see a child taught to read at all, unless the other conditions of its education were alike gentle and judicious."

Ruskin says a well-trained man should know the literature of his own country and half a dozen cla.s.sics thoroughly; but unless he wishes to travel, the language and literature of modern Europe and of the East are unnecessary. To read fast any book worth reading is folly. Ruskin would not have us read Grote's "History of Greece," for any one could write it if "he had the vanity to waste his time;" "Confessions of Saint Augustine," for it is not good to think so much about ourselves; John Stuart Mill, for his day is over; Charles Kingsley, for his sentiment is false, his tragedy frightful. Hypatia is the most ghastly story in Christian tradition, and should forever have been left in silence; Darwin, for we should know what _we are_, not what _our embryo was_, or _our skeleton will be_; Gibbon, for we should study the growth and standing of things, not the Decline and Fall (moreover, he wrote the worst English ever written by an educated Englishmen); Voltaire, for his work is to good literature what nitric acid is to wine, and sulphuretted hydrogen to air.

Ruskin also crosses out Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Aristotle (except his "Politics"), Mahomet, Saint Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, Pascal, Spinoza, Butler, Keble, Lucretius, the Nibelungenlied, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Firdusi, the Mahabharata, and Ramayana, the Sheking, Sophocles, and Euripides, Hume, Adam Smith, Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, Lewes, Southey, Longfellow, Swift, Macaulay, Emerson, Goethe, Thackeray, Kingsley, George Eliot, and Bulwer.

His especial favorites are Scott, Carlyle, Plato, and d.i.c.kens. aeschylus, Taylor, Bunyan, Bacon, Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Pope, Goldsmith, Defoe, Boswell, Burke, Addison, Montaigne, Moliere, Sheridan, aesop, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Horace, Cicero, Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, and Tacitus, he condescends to admit as proper to be read.

=Schopenhauer=. "Recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience."

=Seneca=. "If you devote your time to study, you will avoid all the irksomeness of this life."

"It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have."

"Leisure without study is death, and the grave of a living man."

=Shakspeare=. "A book! oh, rare one! be not, as in this fangled world, a garment n.o.bler than it covers."

"My library was dukedom large enough."

=Sidney, Sir Philip=. "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done."

=Smiles, Sam=. "Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book."

=Smith, Alexander=. "We read books not so much for what they say as for what they suggest."

=Socrates=. "Employ your time in improving yourselves by other men's doc.u.ments; so shall you come easily by what others have labored hard to win."

=Solomon=. "He that walketh with wise men shall be wise."

=Spencer, Herbert=. "My reading has been much more in the direction of science than in the direction of general literature; and of such works in general literature as I have looked into, I know comparatively little, being an impatient reader, and usually soon satisfied."

=Stanley, Henry M=. "I carried [across Africa] a great many books,--three loads, or about one hundred and eighty pounds' weight; but as my men lessened in numbers,--stricken by famine, fighting, and sickness,--one by one they were reluctantly thrown away, until finally, when less than three hundred miles from the Atlantic, I possessed only the Bible, Shakspeare, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Norie's Navigation, and the Nautical Almanac for 1877. Poor Shakspeare was afterwards burned by demand of the foolish people of Zinga. At Bonea, Carlyle and Norie and the Nautical Almanac were pitched away, and I had only the old Bible left."

=Swinburne, A. C=. "It would be superfluous for any educated Englishman to say that he does not question the pre-eminence of such names as Bacon and Darwin."

=Taylor, Bayard=. "Not many, but good books."

=Th.o.r.eau=. "Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand."

=Trollope, Anthony=. "The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade."

=Waller, Sir William=. "In my study I am sure to converse with none but wise men; but abroad, it is impossible for me to avoid the society of fools."

=Whateley, Richard=. "If, in reading books, a man does not choose wisely, at any rate he has the chance offered him of doing so."

=Whipple, Edwin P=. "Books,--lighthouses erected in the sea of time."

=White, Andrew D=., President of Cornell, speaking of Scott, says: "Never was there a more healthful and health-ministering literature than that which he gave to the world. To go back to it from Flaubert and Daudet and Tolstoi is like listening to the song of the lark after the shrieking pa.s.sion of the midnight pianoforte; nay, it is like coming out of the glare and heat and reeking vapor of a palace ball into a grove in the first light and music and breezes of the morning.... So far from stimulating an unhealthy taste, the enjoyment of this fiction created distinctly a taste for what is usually called 'solid reading,' and especially a love for that historical reading and study which has been a leading inspiration and solace of a busy life."

=Whitman, Walt=. "For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the night."

=Wolseley, Gen. Lord=. "During the mutiny and China war I carried a Testament, two volumes of Shakspeare that contained his best plays; and since then, when in the field, I have always carried a Book of Common Prayer, Thomas a Kempis, Soldier's Pocket Book, depending on a well-organized postal service to supply me weekly with plenty of newspapers."

=Wordsworth=. "These h.o.a.rds of wealth you can unlock at will."