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Exlpore more Books quotes

"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."

"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."

"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me."
Explore more quotes by Edward Gibbon

"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."

"The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."

"I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being."

"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."

"Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused."

"The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness."
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