All RALPH WALDO EMERSON Quotes about “Books”

“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.”
“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
“Every burned book enlightens the world.”
“Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.”
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
“The virtue of books is to be readable.”
“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.”
“Life is our dictionary.”
“One must be an inventor to read well.”
“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.”
“If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
“We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.”
“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”
“But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.”
“It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.”
“It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.”
“What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.”
“What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.”

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