“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

A man lives by believing something.

Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don’t happen at all.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

There are remedies for all things but death.

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

Impossible is the word for fools in my dictionary.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way – through the power of words – to change the world.

I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.

Endeavor to have always in your hand a pious book, that with this shield you may defend yourself against bad thoughts.

I am writing a book. So far I have the pages numbered.

Let your daughter have first of all the book of Psalms for holiness of heart, and be instructed in the Proverbs of Solomon for her godly life.