Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth.

Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface,not concluded in the appendix. Even Virgil's poetry serves a very different use to me today from what it did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world.

The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.