My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.
—Katherine Paterson (American Novelist)
The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world’s greatest events are not produced, they happen.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
—Stephen King (American Novelist)
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking life by the scruff of the neck.
—Katharine Hepburn (American Actor)
I … know what I do, and am unmoved by men’s blame, or their praise either.
—Robert Browning (English Poet)
So much to do, so little done, such things to be.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
—Horace Mann (American Educator)
This world is a dream within a dream; and as we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as he thinks, from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of youth as visionary; and the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream. Death the last sleep? No! It is the last and final awakening!
—Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist)