
“We are pilgrims, not settlers; this earth is our inn, not our home.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 206.
English Traits (1856)
“We are pilgrims, not settlers; this earth is our inn, not our home.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 206.
Letter to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814)
1810s
“"Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.”
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXV
Following the Equator (1897)
“Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in "Disappearance of Literature" http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=TwaSpee.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=52&division=div1, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194 http://books.google.com/books?id=7etXZ5Q17ngC&pg=PA194
Variant: A classic – something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
“Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”
“History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.”
"Next to Reading Matter"
Roads of Destiny (1909)
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book IV, Ch. 74.
“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
As I Lay Dying (1930)