Quotable Quotes

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  One should never spoil a good theory by explaining it.

  —PETER MCARTHUR

  Once a new idea springs into existence, it cannot be unthought. There is a sense of immortality in a new idea.

  —EDWARD DE BONO

  New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas

  An open mind collects more riches than an open purse.

  —WILL HENRY

  A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

  —JULES RENARD

  READING FURNISHES THE MIND . . .

  Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

  —JOHN LOCKE

  Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

  —JOSEPH ADDISON

  Books may well be the only true magic.

  —ALICE HOFFMAN

  Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

  —HENRY WARD BEECHER

  Reading makes immigrants of us all—it takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

  —HAZEL ROCHMAN

  Against Borders

  There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

  —HELEN HAYES WITH SANDFORD DODY

  On Reflection

  Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

  —BARBARA W. TUCHMAN

  Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

  —BERN WILLIAMS

  If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

  —ARTHUR HELPS

  Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd

  Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

  —AMY LOWELL

  There are no faster or firmer friendships than those between people who love the same books.

  —IRVING STONE

  Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

  —ALDOUS HUXLEY

  Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

  —JESSAMYN WEST

  Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

  —EDMUND BURKE

  No one ever really paid the price of a book—only the price of printing it.

  —LOUIS I. KAHN

  A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

  —THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

  My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.

  —THOMAS HELM

  A book is a success when people who haven’t read it pretend they have.

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES SYNDICATE

  If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

  —WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

  The wise man reads both books and life itself.

  —LIN YUTANG

  The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

  —CARL ROWAN

  The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

  —CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

  —RAY BRADBURY

  Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.

  —LADY BIRD JOHNSON

  A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

  —CAROLINE GORDON

  How to Read a Novel’

  You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

  —PAUL SWEENEY

  Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

  —JEREMY COLLIER

  There is a wonder in reading braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.

  —JIM FIEBIG

  A book, tight shut, is but a block of paper.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

  —WILLIAM STYRON

  A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

  —ROBERTSON DAVIES

  The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

  “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

  —FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

  When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

  —ENRIQUE JARDIEL PONCELA

  Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

  —RAY BRADBURY

  An author retains the singular distinction of being the only person who can remain a bore long after he is dead.

  —SYDNEY J. HARRIS

  For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

  —GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

  You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

  —JOHN CIARDI

  In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.

  —ROBERT PENN WARREN

  Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

  —RITA DOVE

  A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

  —ROBERT FROST

  Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

  —CARL SANDBURG

  The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

  —TOM CLANCY

  Choose an author as you choose a friend.

  —WENTWORTH DILLON

  Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

  —VOLTAIRE

  I cannot conceive how a novelist could fail to pity or love the smallest creation of his imagination; incomplete as these ch
aracters may be, they are the writer’s bond with the real world, its suffering and heartbreak.

  —GABRIELLE ROY

  The Fragile Lights Of Earth: Articles And Memories 1942–1970

  When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

  —WILSON MIZNER

  October is crisp days and cool nights, a time to curl up around the dancing flames and sink into a good book.

  —JOHN SINOR

  in Union-Tribune (San Diego, California)

  There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

  —RED SMITH

  When I want to read a novel, I write one.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  ART IS A STAPLE, LIKE BREAD . . .

  Art is a staple, like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.

  —IRVING STONE

  Depths of Glory

  Art is the signature of civilization.

  —BEVERLY SILLS

  Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

  —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  One Word of Truth . . .

  Every fragment of song holds a mirror to a past moment for someone.

  —FANNY CRADOCK

  War Comes to Castle Rising

  A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

  —SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

  Anyone who says you can’t see a thought simply doesn’t know art.

  —WYNETKA ANN REYNOLDS

  No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary.

  —AMÉDÉE OZENFANT

  Foundations of Modern Art

  Art doesn’t reproduce the visible but rather makes it visible.

  —PAUL KLEE

  It has been said that art is a tryst; for the joy of it maker and beholder meet.

  —KOJIRO TOMITA

  Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

  —TWYLA THARP

  Half of art is knowing when to stop.

  —ARTHUR WILLIAM RADFORD

  The other arts persuade us, but music takes us by surprise.

  —EDUARD HANSLICK

  Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

  —PAT CONROY

  Beach Music

  Country music is three chords and the truth.

  —HARLAN HOWARD

  Music is the way our memories sing to us across time.

  —LANCE MORROW

  in Time

  After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  —ALDOUS HUXLEY

  Music at Night and Other Essays

  Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

  —BERTHOLD AUERBACH

  Music is the shorthand of emotion.

  —LEO TOLSTOY

  Where words fail, music speaks.

  —HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

  Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

  —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts.

  —PAUL HINDEMITH

  He who sings frightens away his ills.

  —MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

  God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  If I may venture my own definition of a folk song, I should call it “an individual flowering on a common stem.”

  —RALPH VAUGHN WILLIAMS

  Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

  —LUCIANO PAVAROTTI

  No one should be allowed to play the violin until he has mastered it.

  —JIM FIEBIG

  Those move easiest who have learned to dance.

  —ALEXANDER POPE

  The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

  —AGNES DE MILLE

  Inside every man there is a poet who died young.

  —STEPHAN KANFER

  There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

  —PABLO PICASSO

  Every artist was first an amateur.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  The greatest artist was once a beginner.

  —Farmer’s Digest

  All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

  —ALFRED STIEGLITZ

  What art offers is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.

  —JOHN UPDIKE

  More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

  —JOAN MIRÓ

  Art is the triumph over chaos.

  —JOHN CHEEVER

  What is art but a way of seeing?

  —THOMAS BERGER

  Being Invisible

  A great artist is never poor.

  —ISAK DINESEN

  Anecdotes of Destiny

  Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

  —BERN WILLIAMS

  No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent; work transforms talent into genius.

  —ANNA PAVLOVA

  Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability.

  —ROY L. SMITH

  Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

  —JOHN UPDIKE

  Odd Jobs

  When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

  —JOHN RUSKIN

  I created nothing; I invented nothing; I imagined nothing; I perverted nothing; I simply discovered drama in real life.

  —BERNARD SHAW

  There’s no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that’s what counts.

  —DAVID HOCKNEY

  Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

  —PABLO PICASSO

  Really we create nothing. We merely plagiarize nature.

  —JEAN BAITAILLON

  A great city is one that handles its garbage and art equally well.

  —BOB TALBERT

  A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

  —EUDORA WELTY

  The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

  —ORSON WELLES

  Of course, there must be subtleties. Just make sure you make them obvious.

  —BILLY WILDER

  It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

  —ISAAC ASIMOV

  Foundation

  Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.

  —JON FRANKLIN

  Writing for Story

  It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit — enable them to see visions and dream dreams.

  —ERIC ANDERSON

  Man creates culture and through culture creates himself.

  —POPE JOHN PAUL II

  in Osservatore Romano

>   IN THE LONG ETERNITY OF TIME . . .

  It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man’s insignificance in the long eternity of time; the deserts speak of his insignificance right now.

  —EDWIN WAY TEALE

  Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

  —TOM STOPPARD

  Forever is a long time, but not as long as it was yesterday.

  —DENNIS H’ORGNIES

  Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Time neither subtracts nor divides, but adds at such a pace it seems like multiplication.

  —BOB TALBERT

  The future is the past returning through another gate.

  —ARNOLD H. GLASOW