If the use of the pen, in brief or full notes, in catchwords or other symbols, will aid him, let him not shrink from the drudgery of the pen and the commonplace book." "Reading is to the mind," says Addison, "what exercise is to the body.
As by the one health is preserved, strengthened and invigorated, by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished and confirmed." "There is a world of science necessary in choosing books," said Bulwer.
"I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion.

One might as well take a rose draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy.

I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him.

Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about." "When I served when a young man in India," said a distinguished English soldier and diplomatist; "when it was the turning point in my life; when it was a mere chance whether I should become a mere card-playing, hooka-smoking lounger, I was fortunately quartered for two years in the neighborhood of an excellent library, which was made accessible to me." "Books," says E.P.Whipple, "are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." "As a rule," said Benjamin Disraeli, "the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information." "You get into society, in the widest sense," says Geikie, "in a great library, with the huge advantage of needing no introductions, and not dreading repulses.

From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in the silent levees of the immortals there is no pride, but the highest is at the service of the lowest, with a grand humility.
You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority; for books are perfectly well-bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any discriminations." Sir William Waller observed, "In my study, I am sure to converse with none but wise men, but abroad it is impossible for me to avoid the society of fools." "It is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge," says Webster, "that what it gains it never loses.
On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its ends become means, all its attainments help to new conquests." "At this hour, five hundred years since their creation," says De Quincey, "the tales of Chaucer, never equaled on this earth for their tenderness and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the modernization of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth.