“A book that reveals the mind is worth more than one that only reveals its subject.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
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
“A book that reveals the mind is worth more than one that only reveals its subject.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw"
Variant translation: A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time — this one, for instance — as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.
Other Inquisitions (1952)
John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law
as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.
Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)
Context: A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153
“Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
“If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist
Source: Epigrams, p. 353