"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet. but his books were read.'"
--Hilaire Belloc
"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
--John Milton
"The true University of these days is a collection of books."
--Thomas Carlyle
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book."
--Samuel Johnson
"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."
--C. N. Bovee
"For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed."
--Henry Thoreau
"Literature is news that stays news."
--Ezra Pound
"The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words."
--Logan P. Smith
"The only reward to be expected from the cultivation literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds."
--Voltaire
"But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions in succeeding ages."
--Francis Bacon
