f a man can purchase but very few books, my first advice to him would be,
let him purchase the very best. If he cannot spend
much, let him spend well. The best will always be the cheapest. Leave mere dilutions and attenuations to those who can afford such
luxuries. Do not buy milk and water, but get condensed milk, and put what water you like to it yourself. This age is full of word-spinners
-- professional book-makers, who hammer a grain of matter so thin that it will cover a five-acre sheet of paper: these men have
their uses, as gold-beaters have, but they are of no use to you.
Charles Spurgeon
[Speaking of the Reformers] These diabolical people print their books at great expense, notwithstanding the great danger;
not looking for any gain, they give them away to everybody, and even scatter them abroad by night.
Sir Thomas Moore
A book continues working when the meeting has ended. It accompanies the audience back to their homes. It goes on speaking
to them. Literature is the second leg of Christian proclamation.
Klaus Bockmuehl
In the past the pen has been the hammer to break the errors of centuries. But now the enemies of the truth have learned the value
of books and with word processors and printing presses they have left those who love the biblical Christianity far behind . . . A
minister can lead his people to see the importance of the use of good literature just as he leads them in other truths.
Ernest Reisinger
A good library should be looked upon as an indispensable part of church furniture; and the deacons, whose business it is "to
serve tables," will be wise if, without neglecting the table of the Lord, or of the poor, and without diminishing the supplies of the
minister's dinner-table, they give an eye to his study-table, aand keep it supplied with new works and standard books in fair abundance.
It would be money well laid out, and would be productive far beyond expectation.
Charles Spurgeon
. . . for Gresham Machen never went anywhere, it seemed, without having immediately at hand a large supply of reading matter, and
even specified that his top coats should be tailored with spacious additional inside pockets for this purpose.
Ned Stonehouse
. . . but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
John Milton
When an unexperienced person thus ventures into the uncertain tide of opinions, he is liable to be hurried hither and thither with
the changing stream; to fall in with every new proposal, and to be continually embarrassed with the difficulty of distinguishing
between probability and truth. Or if, at last, he happily finds a clue to lead him through the labyrinth wherein so many have been lost, he
will acknowledge, upon a review, that from what he remembers to have read (for perhaps the greater part he has wholly forgotten), he has
gained little more than a discovery of what mistakes, uncertainty, insignificance, acrimony, and presumption, are often obtruded on the
world under the disguise of a plausible title-page.
John Newton
The Scriptures are sufficient for their proper use, which is to be a law of faith and life, if they be understood. But, 1. They are not
sufficient for that which they were never intended for: 2. And we may by other books be greatly helped in understanding them. 3. If other books
were not needful, teachers were not needful; for writing is but the most advantageous way of teaching by fixed characters, which fly not
from our memory as transient words do. And who is it that understandeth the Scriptures that never had a teacher? And why said the eunuch,
"How should I (understand what I read) unless some man guide me?" Acts 8:31. And why did Christ set teachers in his church to the end, till
it be perfected? Eph. 4:11-13, if they must not teach the church unto the end. Therefore they may write unto the end.
Richard Baxter
But perhaps there is no writer who admits us so intimately into the heart of that age as Augustine. Sometimes he does so by accident,
as when he comments on the fact -- to him, apparently, remarkable -- that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see
his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth of a new world.
Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even "reading" (in our sense) did not yet exist. The book
was still a logos, a speech; thinking was still
dialegesthai, talking. Before us is our own world, the world of the printed or written page,
and of the solitary reader who is accustomed to pass hours in the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters.
C.S. Lewis
