Leon Wieseltier Quotes

I have to admit that I am really partial to the look and feel of a book. I have been that way my entire life. I like the weight, look, and feel of a book. I enjoy turning the pages, and frequently scan the spines of my many books on the wall, each title a reminder of the stored information and creative thoughts contained therein.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

I am very attracted by the mysterious landscape of Easter Island. Not only because it is a piece of land that is further away from another, but also because of the beautiful statues of Moai that are there. To do a beautiful walk there, I would have to involve the Moai, and the Rapa Nui people who live on the island.

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not adistance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,--nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

The wealth of mankind is the wisdom they leave.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

Italy will start the future. Because in the last 20, 20 years, Italy discussed only about the past. "Oh, the past is wonderful in Italy." Look, look Palazzo Vecchio. The most beautiful place in the world, in my opinion, I think this is incredible place. But the past is not sufficient. Is not enough. We need the future. Because we are Italians. And Italy is not only a museum.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

Folks, folks, we want to end Obamacare, we want to go to a plan that's so much better and so much less expensive, right? We want to have borders and we want people to come into our country. We welcome people, but they have to come in through a legal process. So, we're going to have a wall, but it's going to have a big, beautiful door and people are going to come into America, but they're going to come in legally.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.

It was beautiful and rare, and you have every right to despise me." She stood pressed to the wall, not moving. "When you came in, I thought 'Send her away.' But I knew that if you went away, I'd run after you. I thought 'I won't say a word.' But I knew that you'd know it before you left. I love you. I know you'd think kindlier of me if I said that I hate you.

I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was thinking that gratitude is too much absent in our lives now, and we need it back, even if it only takes the form of acknowledging the blue of a bowl against the red of cranberries.

England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy sister calls! Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death And close her from thy ancient walls?

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it.

Books served to keep hard-won knowledge safe. They endured.