In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pas…

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.