Augustine Birrell

Augustine Birrell (19 January 1850 – 20 November 1933) was an English essayist, biographer and politician.

• That great dust-heap called ‘history’.
  • "Carlyle", in Obiter Dicta (1884)

• A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.
  • "In the Name of the Bodleian"

• It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.
  • "In the Name of the Bodleian"

• We do not get many glimpses of Bodley's habits of life or ways of thinking, but there is no difficulty in discerning a strenuous, determined, masterful figure, bent during his later years, perhaps tyrannously bent, on effecting his object. He was not, we learn from a correspondent, 'hasty to write but when the posts do urge him, saying there need be no answer to your letters till more leisure breed him opportunity.' 'Words are women, deeds are men,' is another saying of his which I reprint without comment.
  • "In the Name of the Bodleian"

• Great is bookishness and the charm of books.
  • "Bookworms"

• Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.
  • "Bookworms"

• Oh, those scoundrelly Charity Commissioners! […] By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine bookworm, the paper-eating insect, ravenous as he once was, has done comparatively little mischief.
  • "Bookworms"

• There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven.
  • "Gossip in a Library"

• There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector.
  • "Gossip in a Library"

• It can never be wrong to give pleasure.
  • "Gossip in a Library"

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Augustine Birrell

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Augustine Birrell

• Works by Augustine Birrell at Project Gutenberg