The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in late years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. From each of them goes out its own voice and just as the touch on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully. No, mouldering books.
Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.
One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction. My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope. They give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves.