
“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Source: Odes to Common Things
“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
“This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.”
From the sixth book, "The Book of the Lover"
The Pillow Book
Auf eine ähnliche Weise sollen in der vollkommnen Litteratur alle Bücher nur Ein Buch seyn, und in einem solchen ewig werdenden Buche wird das Evangelium der Menschheit und der Bildung offenbart werden.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 95
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity
“Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
42 min 33 sec
Variant: A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
The Duty of Owning Books (1859)
Context: Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.
From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book
Variant: Books are... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.