James Hosmer Penniman

“ There are constant allusions in literature and in life to books with which everyone is supposed to be acquainted, such as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Scott and Longfellow. One cannot always choose his business in life, sometimes he is forced to do the first thing that comes to hand, but he need not engage in any recreation that he does not choose and it is his own fault if his pleasures are mean ones. We often meet people whose minds seem flat and stale because they derive their highest inspiration from nothing more elevating than the daily papers. ”

“ Books are always ready to do for us all that our mental state will admit. No man was ever so wretched that he could not claim and receive the companionship and sympathy of the best thought of the best men. No life is so cheerless that it cannot be brightened by books.
Doctor Johnson thought that the most miserable man is he who cannot read on a rainy day. How much those miss who have no love of reading, how time must hang heavily on their hands in illness, in bad weather, in the long evenings. Emerson liked to read and study in a tumultuous privacy of storm. ”

“ Reading is often the only pleasure of the sick, bringing to their rooms the heroes of all ages and the scenes of all climes so that they may forget their sufferings in sailing the ocean with Columbus, or leaving the smoke and turmoil of the city they may wander with Thoreau in leafy nooks by the crystal waters of Walden. Sitting in a poor room, ill-fed and ragged a man may entertain Sir Walter Scott or Lord Macaulay and dismiss them without ceremony when he tires of them. ”

“ Fortunately this can be said of few books but many contain inaccuracies, mis-statements and exaggerations. Weigh and consider all you read in the light of your own experience. Books like life of which they are expressions and authors who produce them are of all kinds, good and bad, uplifting and degrading, true and false. We must value them for what they are, not for what they pretend to be, and, setting aside our own preconceptions and prejudices, lay our minds open to those who seriously and sincerely hold other views than ours. ”

“ Education and culture would be of small value if they were to be terminated by the expiration of a few short years of life. Books are the only work of man that may be said to be omniscient. They are the stored-up memory of the race. As all our experience of life would vanish without memory, so all accurate knowledge of mankind would evaporate without books and we should have nothing to depend upon but tradition.
Without books we should know nothing of the workings of the mighty minds of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Milton. ”

“ Both Poetry and History are in a sense impersonal, being concerned not so much with individuals as such, as with the ideals toward which or the ideas with which men live their lives and do their work. It is biography to which we turn for the most intimate and detailed personal knowledge of a particular great man who may have been the poet whose lines have met response in every heart or the writer whose mind has guided a nation. As dealing with life itself biography may well be regarded as one of the important divisions of literature. ”

“ Lowell thought that the real literary genius stored up the apt or pleasing word, and Ruskin said, “he is the best poet who can by the fewest words touch the greatest number of secret chords of thought in his reader’s own mind, and set them to work in their own way.”
The inspiration and delight derived from familiarity with the best poetry is one of the most precious results of culture. More than any other work of man poetry helps us to cherish the ideal and we look to our ideals to counteract the hardness of our daily life, to strengthen and uplift us. ”

“ The Dark Ages are called so because few books were written in them, and Africa is the Dark Continent because it has no literature.
No other works of man have done so much to spiritualize the race as books. The Laocoon is not as inspiring a creation as the Iliad, the Cologne Cathedral is not as civilizing as Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it has been said that the works of Goethe have advanced the progress of mankind more than all the conquests of Napoleon. Books have more soul than any other human work. A house without books is as dark as a house without windows. ”

“ Literature is the most enduring of the fine arts. No painter, sculptor, or architect has erected so permanent a memorial as the poets have done. Statues may be broken, pictures may fade or be consumed by fire, even the pyramids may crumble away, but the thought contained in great books such as the Iliad and the Aeneid is more nearly eternal than marble or bronze. ”

“ A book may have a message for every one but not the same message for each; one it may encourage, another it may rebuke; one it may lead further in the path he is treading, another it may stop and turn into a better way. Habits of thought due to inheritance or occupation modify and in some measure determine the effect of a book and the nature of its message for each reader.
You should adapt books to your mental state, after a hard day’s work the mind easily wearies, while with the strength of the morning you may read the very best that you are capable of. ”

“ There is an obvious similarity between the biography of a great man by a great man and the portrait of a great man by a great artist. The National Portrait Gallery in London makes real to us the men who have been England’s glory in peace and war. No one can leave it after looking on the faces of Gladstone and Tennyson and Sir John Franklin and the hundreds of others who scorned delights and lived laborious days without having a higher estimate of humanity and being nerved to new efforts, and we may obtain the same effect in a more detailed manner by reading the best biographies. ”

“ The books which do us good are the sincere books, those which are true in the highest sense of the word which give noble and cheerful ideas of life, which make us respect human nature, books written by men who have a helpful message for their fellow strugglers.
There are books which mark epochs in the progress of the world just as the discovery of America and the invention of printing do, and the reading of a book sometimes marks an epoch in life. Great is the joy of meeting a real book by a thoughtful man. ”

“ 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 has been regarded as the inspired mouthpiece of God. ”

“ No other property is so peculiarly our own as our intellectual possessions. They are always with us; no reversal of fortune can deprive us of them. If we share our knowledge with another we still have it, and perhaps in a more orderly and useful form as the result of contact with a different mind, and the belief in the immortality of the soul makes us sure that our mental acquisitions are taken with us beyond the grave. ”

“ Johnson or Milton; we may even follow out the mental processes of Plato or Aristotle, and see what they enjoyed and note what they thought.
Books intensify thought; a book is better than conversation in that it may be brooded over, revised, extended, polished and continued from time to time, but it cannot answer questions except those anticipated by its author. A writer will put into a book thoughts that he would not or could not express in conversation, and through his books we may know intimately a man who was known only superficially by his most familiar contemporaries. ”

“ The power of a book to stimulate the mind is one of its most useful qualities. Some books are more valuable for what they make us think than for what they actually say. It is the reading that we make the most of, whose substance incorporates itself with our mental equipment, that develops and enlarges our faculties. What we read and assimilate becomes part of the character. Rousseau’s Emile, for instance, is one of the most suggestive books ever written; Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbert Spencer and many other educational thinkers have derived their inspiration from Rousseau. ”

“ 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 thousands of thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight, it is difficult really to know a library book with its soiled pages, battered cover and the date when it must be returned impending like the Day of Judgment. ”

“ To keep up with the flood of modern fiction is impossible. There is a great gain if we can find amusement in reading books which inform as well as entertain. Prefer fact to fiction. Few are indifferent to the pathos of Dickens and Thackeray but there is a chord touched in reading of the actual heroism of brave men and women which no imaginary character can affect so strongly. ”

“ Many an institution would be glad to add to a good private collection on a particular subject its own books on the subject and make a memorial alcove to the donor which would prove a far more sensible monument than a shaft in the cemetery. Now that men have learned to respect books public libraries are as nearly immortal as any human institution can be. A great library is the only human institution that can take all knowledge for its province. ”

“ He never read Dante or Milton or Shakespeare.
The habit of communing with great thoughts gives health and vigor to the mind. Men who habitually read the classics have a breadth of view and a toughness of mental fibre which cannot be obtained by those whose highest inspiration is derived from the newspaper and the last novel. Reading the best books gives an elevation of thought which raises above the level of common things, ennobles and makes fine the ordinary daily occupations, dignifies life and makes it worth living. ”

“ When it is looked upon as a development—a chain of causes and effects—it appeals more directly to the reason and the understanding. Most of history we must forget, but we should strive to retain something of interest in reading history, something of power in following up a line of ordinary investigation, something of a disposition to seek for the underlying causes of events, something of a grasp of the mightier tendencies and movements of history that makes it a teacher of the present out of the wealth of its past. ”

“ 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. He deals, to be sure, with facts, as far as he is able to ascertain them, but his generalizations and interpretations of facts are an important part of his work. The historian must abandon prejudice, preconception and predilection of every kind. ”

“ Although there is a luxurious beauty about an elegant edition that is not to be lightly esteemed, there is a satisfaction in knowing that we can derive as much food for thought from a cheap Shakespeare as from a first folio. The truest book-lovers are those who love the thoughts that the books contain. Complete editions of standard authors are the best to own. The print should be large and the books easy to hold and to open. If edited at all, the work should be done by a competent scholar. ”

“ Poetry is life crystalized into literature, its value is in its eternal truth, in its universal adaptation to the higher needs of our nature. It is because we find in poetry what we have observed but could not formulate for ourselves that it impresses us so deeply. George Eliot said of Wordsworth’s poems, “I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them.” ”

“ When we read a number of books on the same subject the memory is helped by the association of ideas, and on the other hand we have high authority for the statement that the memory is weakened by aimless reading. There is perhaps no one pursuit in which so much precious time is wasted, no one in which the energies of mankind are expended to so little purpose, as in such reading. ”

“ We should take a sympathetic interest in the lives of high-minded men, and note how in spite of obstacles and failures they have accomplished their purposes and how some have been great because they nobly tried and in spite of the fact that they nobly failed. Nothing is more helpful than to see that our ills are not peculiar to ourselves, but that others have overcome the same difficulties that are perplexing us. ”

“ The books that help us most are those which demand the exercise of our highest powers, books which have a clear and definite purpose and that appeal to the best that is in us. Such books are not to be understood all at once, but every time we re-read them we get new light upon them. We should not force ourselves to read what we do not understand, but should read the best that we can enjoy and if that is not the best there is, it will be in time if we persevere.
No other occupation is so well adapted to the profitable employment of moments of leisure as reading. ”

“ All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth: whereas the very first step in power is a flight—is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten. ”

“ One should first read a short and reliable book, and, after he has obtained a knowledge of the course of events, expand it by reading longer works and by making a comparison of authorities. Study the history of our own country, but do not forget that it cannot be perfectly understood without studying that of other countries and especially that of England. Students of history consider that Roman history unites the ancient world to the modern; French history is the story of civilization from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, European history centres in French history. ”