Books

If you happen to have an Elzevir classic in your pocket, neither show it nor mention it.
— Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), Letters from a Celebrated Nobleman to his Heir.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910), Mark Twain’s Speeches, 1910.

My desire is … that mine adversary had written a book
— Holy Bible, Job, 31:35.

Of making many books there is no end.
— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 12:12.

Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.
— William Gilbert (1540-1603), De Magnete [All About Magnets], 1600

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Proposition Touching Amendment of Laws.

A fishmonger near the British Museum once discovered that parchment or limp vellum, though defaced by ancient ink or paint, was better than oiled paper for wrapping fish. Before the authorities caught up with him, numerous rare manuscripts had found their way into London kitchens, and from thence to the trash bin.
— Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps, Dover edition, 1979, 6.

Another damned, thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?
— William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1743-1805) (attributed).

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910), ‘Notice’ at the start of Huckleberry Finn, 1884.

You know in England we read their works, but seldom or never take notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and of course leave them in their colleges and obscurity, by which means we are not troubled with their vanity and impertinence.
— Sir Robert Walpole (1676 – 1745), to the philosopher, David Hume.

Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely first, voluminous books, the task of a man’s life to read them over; secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions; thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of the index, sees as much as if he were in the house.
— Thomas Fuller (1608 – 1661), Worthies of England.

King David and King Solomon
Led merry, merry lives,
With many, many lady friends
And many, many wives;
But when old age crept over them,
With many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And King David wrote the Psalms.
— James Ball Naylor

If I were to pray for a taste which would stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown on me, it would be a taste for reading.
— Sir John Herschel (1792 – 1871) ‘Address to the Subscribers of the Windsor and Eton Public Libraries’, Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 73.

Lily: ‘We looked at the books about crystals but they are so dreadful.’
— John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) The Ethics of the Dust, Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation, 1866.

To such a person my hope has been that my treatise would prove of the very greatest assistance. Still, such people may be expected to be quite few in number, while, as for the others, this book will be as superfluous to them as a tale told to an ass.
— Galen, On the natural faculties III, 10

I was in a Printing-House in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
— William Blake (1757 – 1827)

I am the beginning, middle, and end of creation. Of all the sciences I am the science of self-knowledge, and I am logic in those who debate.
— Bhagavad Gita, 10:32, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
— Joseph Joubert (1754 – 1824)

… the man who sets fallen learning upon its feet … is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but all peoples and all generations. Once this was the task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of Ptolemy. But his library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, and Aldus is building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself.
— Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466 – 1536) in Praise of Folly, on Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 – 1515), quoted by Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, 528

… this noble book Catholicon has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types, in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 1460 in the noble city of Mainz of the renowned German nation, which God’s grace has deigned to prefer and distinguish above all other nations of the earth with so lofty a genius and liberal gifts.
— Colophon to the Catholicon, quoted by Boorstin, The Discoverers, 514,  either by Gutenberg or his successors.

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