“Let your house / Be spacious more than splendid, and be books / And busts your most conspicuous furniture.”

— Alfred Austin, Savonarola, 1881

About Alfred Austin

1835 – 1913

English poet, Poet Laureate from 1896 to 1913.

“Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame.”

“Hospitality should be accidental, spontaneous, and impulsive, not pre-arranged and calculated.”

“Friendship craves / The commerce of the mind, not the exchange / Of emulous feasts that foster sycophants.”

“The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day.”

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

“It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things.”

“For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.”

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

“It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author—and not to learn it better.”