Why, When, how and what We Ought to Read |
Common terms and phrases
Abbé Roux admit Agnes Repplier appetite Aubrey de Vere authors Bacon bad books beautiful become better Brother Azarias Brownson called Carlyle Catholic Charles Lamb Christ Church Cicero Cowper cultivated culture daily dead delightful divine duty Emerson essays evil eyes faculties fancy Father Faber friends Geikie George Eliot heart higher human ignorant immortal intellectual intelligence Jesus Leigh Hunt less light literary literature live Lord Bolingbroke Marion Crawford master Maurice Francis Egan mean memory mental mind modern moral nature ness never newspaper noble novel Oliver Wendell Holmes papers Petrarch poet poetry readers religion Remember rule Ruskin sacred says Seek sentimental sentimental novel Shadwell soul speak spirit Sydney Smith taste for reading tell things thought tion to-day true truth weary wise wonder words worth writer wrote young
Popular passages
Page 78 - Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he Should only rule who most resembles me. Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dulness from his tender years ; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Page 78 - ALL human things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey. This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young Was called to empire, and had governed long. In prose and verse was owned, without dispute, Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute.
Page 34 - God be thanked for books ! They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.
Page 26 - For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a phial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Page 53 - We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits . . so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth — 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Page 86 - What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Page 39 - To spend too much time in studies, is sloth ; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience...
Page 54 - When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, "Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim, myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?
Page 34 - No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof ; if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and...
Page 32 - That place, that does Contain my books, the best companions, is To me a glorious court, where hourly I Converse with the old sages and philosophers ; And sometimes for variety I confer With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels ; Calling their victories, if unjustly got, Unto a strict account ; and in my fancy, Deface their ill-placed statues.