Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Books (35 Quotes)

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books and I think no chair is so much needed.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees....

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Mrs. Yule stated in The Docket, Feb. 1912, that she copied this in her handbook from a lecture delivered by Emerson. The mouse-trap quotation was the occasion of a long controversy, owing to Elbert Hubbards claim to its authorship.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --Never read a book that is not a year old. Never read any but the famed books. Never read any but what you like.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Books are for nothing but to inspire.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which must yet have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.

Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead man hopes genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Books are the best of things, well used abused, among the worst. What is the right use What is the one end, which all means go to effect They are for nothing but to inspire.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye . . .

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated . . .

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

I do not hesitate to read. . . all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable --any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

What's a book Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Books are the best things, well used Abused, among the worst.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.