There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs. – Henry Ward Beecher

Classics are not classics because hoary with age — they are the steel balls which have worn down mountains but remained unchanged in the mill of time. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

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