“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

“It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.”

“More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

“One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.”

“Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.”

“To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.”

“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”