“書籍是人類知識的結晶”--William Shakespeare?

[Kenny同志 515]

Hi folks, it's been a long time!

 

I need to find the original English for this quote. It is supposedly from William Shakespeare. 

 

I have tried Google using a variety of combinations of key words but none of my attempts returned any useful results. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance. 

[Shelley 1,649]

I googled quotes from Shakespeare about books, this was one result, not sure if its any of these

http://www.azquotes.com/author/13382-William_Shakespeare/tag/book

[dwq 189]

That website claims this quote is from Shakespeare:

 

     Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

 

Though it doesn't give any source and googling that text only seem to give more unsubstantiated claims of the same.

 

[Kenny同志 515]

Many thanks for your help, Shelley and dwq. 

 

Unfortunately, none of the quotes on that page seems to fit. The quote dwq listed is close, but not close enough.  

 

In fact, the Chinese quote is very well-known in China. But I am not certain if it is really translated from one of William Shakespeare's quotes... 

[evn108 39]

This is funny, the attribution to Shakespeare is probably not really true, I would guess it is at best a kind of paraphrased half-translation of something vaguely related. Ironically the quote is reproduced so often without attribution that it would probably be impossible to find the book in which it originates. So much for 智慧的结晶... 

 

It's often paired with another quote, 书籍是人类进步的阶梯, which is on its own attributed to Maxim Gorky. The closest thing I could find for that is "Each book was a rung on my ascent from the brutish to the human," which is apparently part of an essay that is collected in English translation in a volume titled "On Literature: Selected Essays." I can't get much farther than that online. 

 

I'm guessing if there is any actual Shakespeare quote that this is based on, it is similarly distorted. 

 

Update: The quote dwq mentions above is decidedly non-Shakespearean to me... and it turns out it is actually from Schlegel, in the preface to a collection of lectures on literary history. (page ix here: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=LX0XgmxX_gIC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR9)

[陳德聰 1,454]

I think this is a corruption.

 

“書籍是人類知識的載體，是人類智慧的結晶，是人類進步的階梯” is what I find when I look for this quote.

 

The first part seems like it is Barbara Tuchman’s “Books are the carriers of civilization.”

[evn108 39]

Ah, that completes the trifecta I guess. Tuchman is in pretty good company with Schlegel and Gorky... 

 

And just so people don't think this only happens in Chinese, that quote ("books are the carriers of civilization") is elsewhere on the internet attributed to Thoreau, accompanied by a tacked on, totally out of context excerpt from "Life Without Principle"* so that it reads, "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business." It doesn't even make sense! What incessant business? Is "without books" the "business?" 

 

*The full paragraph of the Thoreau fragment is this, which makes much more sense, and has nothing do do with books as the carriers of civilization...: 

"This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or seared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."

 

In short: Don't believe any attributions of "famous quotes" unless they give you a title, publisher, and page number...

 

 

[Kenny同志 515]

Thanks everybody.

 

This is frustrating. I'll point it out to the client.