How bad things would be for human knowledge if it weren't for writing and printing! Therefore the libraries alone are the certain and enduring memory of the human race, whose individual members all have only a very limited and imperfect memory.
Wie schlecht würde es also um das menschliche Wissen stehn, wenn Schrift und Druck nicht wären. Daher sind die Bibliotheken allein das sichere und bleibende Gedächtniß des menschlichen Geschlechts, dessen einzelne Mitglieder alle nur ein sehr beschränktes und unvollkommenes haben.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, September 05, 2026
Libraries
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 21, § 254 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway):