Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.
A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.
There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.
The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.
The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.
Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.
The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.
The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.
Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.
We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.
They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.
Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.
The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning.
Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.
The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.
My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.
Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.
There is an innate decorum in man, and it is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don't expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth impromptu.
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.
We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
It will be a shock to men when they realize that thoughts that were fast enough for today are not fast enough for tomorrow. But thinking tomorrow's thoughts today is one kind of future life.
The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!
Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.
When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.
I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness.... There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.