Richardson, C. F. "No book, indeed, is of universal value and appropriateness.... Here, as in every other question involved in the choice of books, the golden key to knowledge, a key that will only fit its own proper doors, is purpose."
Ruskin. "All books are divisible into two classes,—the books of the hour and the books of all time." Books of the hour, though useful, are, "strictly speaking, not books at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print," and should not be allowed "to usurp the place of true books."
"Of all the plagues that afflict mortality, the venom of a bad book to weak people, and the charms of a foolish one to simple people, are without question the deadliest; and they are so far from being redeemed by the too imperfect work of the best writers, that I never would wish to see a child taught to read at all, unless the other conditions of its education were alike gentle and judicious."
Ruskin says a well-trained man should know the literature of his own country and half a dozen classics thoroughly; but unless he wishes to travel, the language and literature of modern Europe and of the East are unnecessary. To read fast any book worth reading is folly. Ruskin would not have us read Grote's "History of Greece," for any one could write it if "he had the vanity to waste his time;" "Confessions of Saint Augustine," for it is not good to think so much about ourselves; John Stuart Mill, for his day is over; Charles Kingsley, for his sentiment is false, his tragedy frightful. Hypatia is the most ghastly story in Christian tradition, and should forever have been left in silence; Darwin, for we should know what we are, not what our embryo was, or our skeleton will be; Gibbon, for we should study the growth and standing of things, not the Decline and Fall (moreover, he wrote the worst English ever written by an educated Englishmen); Voltaire, for his work is to good literature what nitric acid is to wine, and sulphuretted hydrogen to air.
Ruskin also crosses out Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Aristotle (except his "Politics"), Mahomet, Saint Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, Spinoza, Butler, Keble, Lucretius, the Nibelungenlied, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Firdusi, the Mahabharata, and Ramayana, the Sheking, Sophocles, and Euripides, Hume, Adam Smith, Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, Lewes, Southey, Longfellow, Swift, Macaulay, Emerson, Goethe, Thackeray, Kingsley, George Eliot, and Bulwer.
His especial favorites are Scott, Carlyle, Plato, and Dickens. Æschylus, Taylor, Bunyan, Bacon, Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Pope, Goldsmith, Defoe, Boswell, Burke, Addison, Montaigne, Molière, Sheridan, Æsop, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Horace, Cicero, Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, and Tacitus, he condescends to admit as proper to be read.
Schopenhauer. "Recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience."
Seneca. "If you devote your time to study, you will avoid all the irksomeness of this life."
"It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have."
"Leisure without study is death, and the grave of a living man."