“When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

“Never read a book that is not a year old.”

“What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.”

“Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.”

“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”

“Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.”

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”