Books

Famous quotes containing the word books:

    Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Critics generally come to be critics not by reason of their fitness for this, but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were a crime, and counsel should be heard on both sides.
    Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

    An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
    Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)