Quotes about Literature

On Monday I received a letter from Golden Days, a Philadelphia juvenile, accepting a short story I had sent there and enclosing a cheque for five dollars. It was the first money my pen had ever earned; I did not squander it in riotous living, neither did I invest it in necessary boots and gloves. I went up town and bought five volumes of poetry with it -- Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Longfellow, Whittier. I wanted something I could keep for ever in memory of having arrived.

Prose, rightly written and read, is sometimes as beautiful as poetry.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish this desired end.

Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

[Science] is the literature of God written on the stars-the trees-the rocks-and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

But for this book we could not know right from wrong.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine .

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Because books, my friends, are true magic bound between two covers.