Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.