Quotes about books and writing

All human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Reader, I married him.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.

I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading!

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.

It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Words, words, words.

History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.

Instead of contradicting my words people ought to act in my spirit.

Converts are not in my good books.

Every word that we utter rouses its contrary.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

The spirit of wrath—not the words—is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.

As the plough follows words, so God rewards prayers.

ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author’s ideas that they were “concatenated without abruption.”

ARISTOCRACY, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts—guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters—the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

DATARY, n. A high ecclesiastic official of the Roman Catholic Church, whose important function is to brand the Pope’s bulls with the words Datum Romae. He enjoys a princely revenue and the friendship of God.

DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evolved instead—a circumstance from which that wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that the ladies are the greater sufferers from dyspepsia.

ERUDITION, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America’s most precious discoveries and possessions.

GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.

GOOD, adj. Sensible, madam, to the worth of this present writer. Alive, sir, to the advantages of letting him alone.

HASH, x. There is no definition for this word—nobody knows what hash is.

KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for “bliss.” It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

LUMINARY, n. One who throws light upon a subject; as an editor by not writing about it.

MEANDER, n. To proceed sinuously and aimlessly. The word is the ancient name of a river about one hundred and fifty miles south of Troy, which turned and twisted in the effort to get out of hearing when the Greeks and Trojans boasted of their prowess.

MISCREANT, n. A person of the highest degree of unworth. Etymologically, the word means unbeliever, and its present signification may be regarded as theology’s noblest contribution to the development of our language.

OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an old man. Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an old book.

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; it meant “own,” and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

POSTERITY, n. An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular author’s contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.

PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.

QUOTATION, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in “dialect” and humor in slang.

REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

RESTITUTION, n. The founding or endowing of universities and public libraries by gift or bequest.

REVELATION, n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.

SCIMITAR, n. A curved sword of exceeding keenness, in the conduct of which certain Orientals attain a surprising proficiency, as the incident here related will serve to show. The account is translated from the Japanese of Shusi Itama, a famous writer of the thirteenth century.

SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one’s own.

SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words, “I beg your pardon,” and it is not inconsistent with disregard of the rights of others.

USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.

YOKE, n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe one of the most illuminating words in our language—a word that defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy. A thousand apologies for withholding it.

ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man’s burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)

The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.

As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.

There is no less eloquence in the voice, in the eyes and in the air of a speaker than in his choice of words.

It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author—and that he did not learn it better.

Reading ought to mean understanding; writing ought to mean knowing something; believing ought to mean comprehending; when you desire a thing, you will have to take it; when you demand it, you will not get it; and when you are experienced, you ought to be useful to others.

Whether memoirs are written by masters of servants, or by servants of masters, the processes always meet.

Error is continually repeating itself in action, and we must unweariedly repeat the truth in word.

It should be our earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason. It is an endeavour which we cannot evade, and which is daily to be renewed.

I am quite prepared to find that many a reader will disagree with me; but when he has a thing before him in black and white, he must let it stand. Another reader may perhaps take up the very same copy and agree with me.

Literature is a fragment of fragments: the least of what happened and was spoken, has been written; and of the things that have been written, very few have been preserved.

The most original authors of modern times are so, not because they produce what is new, but only because they are able to say things the like of which seem never to have been said before.

Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

An author can show no greater respect for his public than by never bringing it what it expects, but what he himself thinks right and proper in that stage of his own and others’ culture in which for the time he finds himself.

Productions are now possible which, without being bad, have no value. They have no value, because they contain nothing; and they are not bad, because a general form of good-workmanship is present to the author’s mind.

A romance is a subjective epic in which the author begs leave to treat the world after his own ideas. The only question is, whether he has any ideas; the rest will follow of itself.

If a man sets out to reproach an author with obscurity, he should first of all examine his own mind, to see if he is himself all clearness within. Twilight makes even plain writing illegible.

The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.

We really learn only from those books which we cannot criticise. The author of a book which we could criticise would have to learn from us.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

The Greeks, whose poetry and rhetoric was of a simple and positive character, express approval more often than disapproval. With the Latin writers it is the contrary; and the more poetry and the arts of speech decay, the more will blame swell and praise shrink.

Shakespeare’s Henry IV. If everything were lost that has ever been preserved to us of this kind of writing, the arts of poetry and rhetoric could be completely restored out of this one play.

Shakespeare is dangerous reading for budding talents: he compels them to reproduce him, and they fancy they are producing themselves.

Yorick Sterne was the finest spirit that ever worked. To read him is to attain a fine feeling of freedom; his humour is inimitable, and it is not every kind of humour that frees the soul.

But in popular ballads there is always this advantage, that in the art of saying things shortly uneducated men are always better skilled than those who are in the strict sense of the word educated.

Art is a medium of what no tongue can utter; and thus it seems a piece of folly to try to convey its meaning afresh by means of words. But, by trying to do so, the understanding gains; and this, again, benefits the faculty in practice.

Spirit is now a very fashionable word: to act with spirit, to speak with spirit, means only, to act rashly, and to talk indiscreetly. An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions: he is neither hot nor timid.

When the old clipped money was called in for a new coinage in King William’s time, to prevent the like for the future, they stamped on the edges of the crown pieces these words, et decus et tutamen. That is exactly the case of good breeding.