Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

A book is the only immortality

In all the world there is nothing so curious and so interesting and so beautiful as truth.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.

There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty — and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.