“Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.”

“Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.”

“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it”

“The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.”

“The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.”

“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”