A Quote by Joseph Howe

My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.
There are two books laid before us to study, to prevent our falling into error; first, the volume of the Scriptures, which reveal the will of God; then the volume of the Creatures, which express His power.
Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.
Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.
I am of the level with common Astrologers; who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can carry beyond the grave is wisdom.
As parents, we should remember that our lives may be the book from the family library which the children most treasure. Are our examples worthy of emulation? Do we live in such a way that a son or a daughter may say, ‘I want to follow my dad,’ or ‘I want to be like my mother’? Unlike the book on the library shelf, the covers of which shield its contents, our lives cannot be closed. Parents, we truly are an open book in the library of learning of our homes.
Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's - not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you - not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity - not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul - a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's.
To get a name can happen but to few. A name, even in the most commercial nation, is one of the few things which cannot be bought . It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.
There is another side to me which people don't often see, but it's very hard for me to show that. When I do interviews, I'm talking to people I don't know and when you speak to a stranger you don't open up, do you? In my position, people are always looking for something to say about me. And anything I do say, given half-a-chance they'll turn it round into something spectacular so I've got to be very careful. That's why it's only my friends and family who know the real me. Now my wife, Lainya, she could tell you a few stories.
I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.
I have served many long and lonely years aboard ship in war zones, and the only thing that kept me sane during all that enforced loneliness was my access to a good library in which I read, literally, every book on the shelves, even textbooks, and which gave me access to other worlds no way open to me.
In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.
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