Books are preserved parts of minds.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

I have seen men hazard their fortunes, go on long journeys halfway around the world, forge friendships, even lie, cheat and steal, all for the gain of a book.

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.