Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive
PetrarchLife in itself is short enough, but the physicians with their art, know to their amusement, how to make it still shorter.
PetrarchEach famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.
Petrarch