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
“An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing.”
First Century, sect. 1.
Centuries of Meditations
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Thomas Traherne 16
English poet 1636–1674Related quotes
Krzysztof Kieślowski
(1941–1996) Polish film director and screenwriter
As quoted in "Kieślowski's Many Colours" by Patrick Abrahamsson, in Oxford University Student newspaper (2 June 1995) — republished at Musicolog.com http://www.musicolog.com/kieslowski_manycolours.asp#.Vt_PAsdSj8s
Context: If there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word "love" has the same meaning for everybody. Or "fear", or "suffering". We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.
Cleon.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Attributed without source to Einstein in Mieczyslaw Taube, Evolution of Matter and Energy on a Cosmic and Planetary Scale (1985), page 1
Disputed
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
Twice-Told Tales, Preface http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/tttpf.html (1851)
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
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.
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).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Tommaso Campanella
(1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet
"Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, p. 218.
