“I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass…than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun…to read the book of God…the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe.”
"Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, p. 218.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Tommaso Campanella3
Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet 1568–1639Related quotes
Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer
Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998). <br class="br">City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html <br class="br">Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Novalis book Blüthenstaub
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)
“The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
The Art of Persuasion
Edmund Landau (1877–1938) German Jewish mathematician
Grundlagen der Analysis [Foundations of Analysis] (1930) Preface for the Teacher, as quoted by Eli Maor, Trigonometric Delights (2013)
Matta El Meskeen (1919–2006) Egyptian monk
Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
precedes by twelve years Truman Capote’s putdown of Jack Kerouac: “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.”; “from Verse Chronicle”, p. 137
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)