There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest,
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The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
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He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, I am better now. Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead. The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet, unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.
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There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
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Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
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