Master books, but do not let ...

Master books, but do not let them master you.
Master books, but do not let them master you.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

More phrases

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Quotes from the same author

As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.
 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton