Books are the leaven of the bread of life, the stairs of humanity,
The cables that hold to us, as to a shore, the freighted supply ship of the past,
Important as helping one’s personal qualities, and the use and power of a man.

I would read, read, read—it’s a good habit to get into;
All my own tastes are towards books you can easily handle—put in your pocket—
To put a book in your pocket and off to the seashore or the forest, that is an ideal pleasure,
I know I did my best reading when I was alone that way.

I don’t know but in reading the best method is to simply let the mind caper about and do as it chooses—or as it don’t choose, as it must. My reading is wholly without plan; the first thing at hand, that is what I pick up. I read by fits and starts—fragments—no sequence, no order, no nothing.
I never try to create interest for myself in a book. If the interest don’t come of its own account I drop my experiment—I would no more force my reading than my writing.

I read a book in which I have a special interest three times or more—
Once to get its capital features,
Then after some delay I go at it again for its atmosphere, spirit, and so on; that’s reading number two,
Then comes number three: I read finally for conclusions;
I will only come at an opinion of the book by very patient waiting.

I have to read, but after all that has never been the chief thing with me. Books are like men—the best of them have flaws. (Thank God for the flaws!)
And books won’t say what we must have said. Try all that books may, they can’t say it. What they are all doing in books is strain to make an impression—everything loved that will dazzle the beholder, everything hated that will not.

I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing. The way books are made, that always excites my curiosity. All that goes to the making of what is published is unknown—ever must be unknown. And it is a vast sea of itself. Less than a thousandth part—a thousandth thousandth part—of things written, prepared, studied, gets into print. Oh the tragedy and pathos of it!

It is marvelous what capacity books have for destroying as well as making a man;
The best man in the world is the man who has absorbed great books, made the most of them,
Yet remains unspoiled—remains a man.

Book learning is good, all book knowledge is,
But a man may be of great excellence and effect with very little of it.
Is it you that thought the educated wiser than you?
Because you are no scholar and never saw your name in print, do you give in that you are any less immortal?
Powerful unlearned persons are also grand,
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. 
The greatest writers are well pleased and at their ease among the unlearned,
Are received by common men and women familiarly, do not hold out obscure,
But come welcome to table, bed, leisure, by day and night.

There are plenty who do not own books,
But all men and women possess in fee simple something better than any and all books—
The curbless and bottomless mine itself,
Of whence books are but the dust and scraps,
The real stuff whereof they are the artificial transcript and portraiture.
Life is always better than book,
Life in life is always superior to life in a book;
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

So shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring.
I am a student, free, of a library; it is limitless and eternally open to me,
The books written in numberless tongues, always perfect and alive—
These forms, the least insect or animal, beetles rolling balls of dung—
I read every page, and enjoy the meaning of the same,
Breathing the open airs—never, never the odor of libraries!

In libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,
No shutter’d room can commune with me,
But roughs and little children better than they.
I care less and less for books as books,
More and more for people as people;
The person is the spinal matter in books.
When I can touch the body of books by night or by day and when they touch my body back again,
I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women like you.

Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?
Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages,
Unwitting today that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Which is the theory or book that is not diseased?
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d,
You shall no longer feed on the spectres in books!

NEXT: THE POET, SCHOLARS, AND SCHOOLS

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