The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.

We are all citizens of history.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.