Books are short excerpts from the wide-ranging folio volumes of life, and the only person who fulfills the writer's high calling is the one who sorts through the many bad things they sometimes contain and only reads out the best parts, separating the useless from the necessary and the common from the noble.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
25 June 2012
The Folio Volumes of Life
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804-1872), from his collection of aphorisms Abälard und Heloise (Ansbach: Carl Brügel, 1834), p. 8. My own translation: