The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Science is the topography of ignorance.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being