Books and how to make the most of them

A book is a miracle wrought by human agency. What more wonderful than that the thought of a lifetime should be made visible and concentrated so as to be carried in the pocket; t...

Whatever your purpose, books will help you to accomplish it. They make the knowledge of mankind our own if we know how to avail ourselves of them. Only the wise can get the best...

Most of us forget, as Andrew Lang says, “with an ease and readiness only to be acquired by practice,” and would agree with Montaigne that “if I be a man of some reading, yet I a...

Many people live in first-class houses, stay at first-class hotels, travel in first-class steamships and railway trains and then read third or fourth-class books. For them one b...

“The most important step toward getting mental power is the acquisition of a right method in work and a just standard of attainment,” says President Elliot. The secret of succes...

The national library of France contains about three million books and the British Museum requires forty miles of shelves to accommodate its two million volumes. The room which c...

Poetry is the flower of literature, the most perfect utterance of the human mind in no other of his works does man so nearly approach the Divine, so that in every age the poet h...

Great poetry is the expression of the spiritual life, not of the poet merely, but of the poet in his capacity of forthteller of what is divine and universal in human life. Histo...

The object of history is to tell us not only what happened but the causes and results of what happened, and this leads the historian into almost every field of human interest. H...

Fiction which includes two closely related forms, the novel or romance and the drama, has two functions; the more important being the interpreting and reflecting of life, the ho...

We do not get the most out of a book unless we own it; we cannot take a personal interest in borrowed books, and, although it pleases Mr. Augustine Birrell to think of the thous...