Volume Quotes - Page 23

• Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

  Matthew Tobin Anderson

  Book, Broken, Century

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• Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.

  Julian Assange

  Intellectual, Records, Treasure

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• Kindness n: A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Kindness, Ten

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.142, University of Georgia Press

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• Within the book and volume of thy brain.

  William Shakespeare

  Book, Brain

  William Shakespeare, Samuel Ayscough, Nicholas Rowe, Samuel Johnson (1791). “Shakspeare's Dramatic Works: With Explanatory Notes. To which is Now Added, a Copious Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words”, p.1152

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• We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Funny, Book, Reading

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1959). “Emerson: A Modern Anthology”

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• The world is a great volume, and man the index of that book; even in the body of man, you may turn to the whole world.

  John Donne

  Book, Men, World

  John Donne (1839). “The Works of John Donne: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.484

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• The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Volcanoes, Sight

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.280, Harvard University Press

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• Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Library, Research, Management

  Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne (1974). “Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays”, p.491, Oxford University Press

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• It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Distance, Science, Finite Number

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• Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Four, Brilliant, Consciousness

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• I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.

  Georges Braque

  Art, Skills, Weight

  Raymond Cogniat, Georges Braque, Joanne Greenspun (1980). “Georges Braque”

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• In preparing the present volume, it has been the aim of the author to do full justice to the ample material at his command, and, where possible, to make the illustrations tell the main story to anatomists. The text of such a memoir may soon lose its interest, and belong to the past, but good figures are of permanent value. [Justifying elaborate illustrations in his monographs.]

  Othniel Charles Marsh

  Science, Past, Illustration

  Othniel Charles Marsh (1886). “Dinocerata: A Monograph of an Extinct Order of Gigantic Mammals”

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• This boulder seemed like a curious volume, regularly paged, with a few extracts from older works. Bacon tells us that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Of the last honour I think the boulder fully worthy.

  Archibald Geikie

  Book, Science, Thinking

  Sir Archibald Geikie (1858). “The Story of a Boulder: Or, Gleanings from the Note-book of a Field Geologist”, p.4

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• On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.

  William Safire

  Book, Yale, Editors

  "'To - Be' or Not 'To - Be'" by William Safire, www.nytimes.com. November 26, 2006.

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• No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wall, Writing, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.167

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• I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.

  Aaron Levie

  Real, Believe, Opportunity

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• My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.

  Joseph Howe

  Book, Library, World

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• For books [Charles Darwin] had no respect, but merely considered them as tools to be worked with. ... he would cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He used to boast that he had made Lyell publish the second edition of one of his books in two volumes, instead of in one, by telling him how ho had been obliged to cut it in half. ... his library was not ornamental, but was striking from being so evidently a working collection of books.

  Francis Darwin

  Book, Cutting, Science

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• If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

  Aldous Huxley

  Military, Animal, Perfect

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “Point Counter Point”, p.108, Random House

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• For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

  Helen Vendler

  College, Discovery, Views

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• Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Country, Wisdom, Mistake

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.773, Library of Alexandria

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• Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

  John Banville

  Math, Null, Mixtures

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• We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

  Michael Herr

  Hands, Enemy, Warfare

  Michael Herr (2011). “Dispatches”, p.153, Vintage

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• What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who do
  creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap.
  For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s
  trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not… your taste is why your work
  disappoints you… We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want
  it to have. We all go through this… It is only by going through a volume of work
  that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your
  ambitions.

  Ira Glass

  Couple, Ambition, Years

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• He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)

  George Steiner

  Book, Night, Men

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