books: classics quotes

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Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of retired... - MORE Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

T.B. Aldrich

books: classics

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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Alan Bennett

books: classics

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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

books: classics

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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 morni... - MORE 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

books: classics

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There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin ... - MORE There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital.

W.E.B. Du Bois

books: classics

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There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, s... - MORE There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

books: classics

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A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man. A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

Edmond De Goncourt

books: classics

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The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living. - MORE The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Thomas Hobbes

books: classics | writers and writing | praise

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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and th... - MORE The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Milan Kundera

books: classics

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What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us! What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!

James Russell Lowell

books: classics

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