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"Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."
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"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."

"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
Explore more quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

"You can't, if you can't feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You'll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration's to your taste,But you'll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart's space."

"Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity."

"Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you'd live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero."
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