Quotes by Philosophers - Page 307

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.
Ayn Rand
Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?
Friedrich Nietzsche
The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...
Louis de la Forge
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
Henry David Thoreau
The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
Henry David Thoreau
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Mortimer J. Adler
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch.
Marcus Aurelius
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
G.K. Chesterton
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
Henry David Thoreau
Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
Thomas Paine
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.
Umberto Eco
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.
Michel de Montaigne
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Henry David Thoreau
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
Umberto Eco
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.
Umberto Eco
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
Epictetus
Associate with noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other people.
Thomas Davidson
The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel Foucault
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanisław Lem
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
I hate books they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
Walter Kaufmann
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Umberto Eco
As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.
Ludwig Feuerbach
This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Elbert Hubbard
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted ...but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Voltaire
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
My books are friends that never fai
Thomas Carlyle
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
Alain de Botton
Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.
Seneca
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
Voltaire
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Umberto Eco
All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
John Ruskin
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1.tHomer – Iliad, Odyssey2.tThe Old Testament3.tAeschylus – Tragedies4.tSophocles – Tragedies5.tHerodotus – Histories6.tEuripides – Tragedies7.tThucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War8.tHippocrates – Medical Writings9.tAristophanes – Comedies10.tPlato – Dialogues11.tAristotle – Works12.tEpicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13.tEuclid – Elements14.tArchimedes – Works15.tApollonius of Perga – Conic Sections16.tCicero – Works17.tLucretius – On the Nature of Things18.tVirgil – Works19.tHorace – Works20.tLivy – History of Rome21.tOvid – Works22.tPlutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia23.tTacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24.tNicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic25.tEpictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion26.tPtolemy – Almagest27.tLucian – Works28.tMarcus Aurelius – Meditations29.tGalen – On the Natural Faculties30.tThe New Testament31.tPlotinus – The Enneads32.tSt. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33.tThe Song of Roland34.tThe Nibelungenlied35.tThe Saga of Burnt Njál36.tSt. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica37.tDante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38.tGeoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39.tLeonardo da Vinci – Notebooks40.tNiccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41.tDesiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly42.tNicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43.tThomas More – Utopia44.tMartin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises45.tFrançois Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel46.tJohn Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion47.tMichel de Montaigne – Essays48.tWilliam Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49.tMiguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote50.tEdmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51.tFrancis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52.tWilliam Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays53.tGalileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54.tJohannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55.tWilliam Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56.tThomas Hobbes – Leviathan57.tRené Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58.tJohn Milton – Works59.tMolière – Comedies60.tBlaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61.tChristiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light62.tBenedict de Spinoza – Ethics63.tJohn Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64.tJean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies65.tIsaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66.tGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67.tDaniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe68.tJonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69.tWilliam Congreve – The Way of the World70.tGeorge Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge71.tAlexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72.tCharles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73.tVoltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74.tHenry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75.tSamuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
Mortimer J. Adler
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
Noam Chomsky
I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
Umberto Eco
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton