"A small number of choice books are..." - Quote by Voltaire

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”

“Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.”

“Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.”

“If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.”

“Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.”

“I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.”

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”

“Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.”

“The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.”