By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain: As, painfully to pore upon a book, To seek the light of truth, which truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei.
On the Day of Judgment, the servant of Allah will be given his book of deeds, where he finds rewards for things he did not do, so he asks: O My Lord, where did I get these deeds?
So Allah replies to him saying: These are because of the people who backbited you and you did not know about it.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book.
I am absent altogether too much to be a suitable instructor for a law-student. When a man has reached the age that Mr. Widner has,and has already been doing for himself, my judgment is, that he reads the books for himself without an instructor. That is precisely the way I came to the law.
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
People say strange things, the boy thought. Sometimes it's better to be with the sheep, who don't say anything. And better still to be alone with one's books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them. But when you're talking to people, they say some things that are so strange that you don't know how to continue the conversation.