Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty seven names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

The monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone's lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are 'out of sight, out of mind.' In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.

But indeed nobody knows what inarticulate traditions, remnants of old wisdom, priceless though quite anonymous, survive in many modern things that still have life in them.

Personally I think the thing that will survive, as survives so many important figures, is the writing that they leave behind and he has left behind many books that he wrote when he was simply Joseph Ratzinger and they are standing the test of time quite well, in my view.

As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.

How did he do it? First of all, with the help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York, he collected books and had them copied. People don’t always realise that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne, and almost any classical text that survived until the eighth century has survived till today.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

One of the few, the immortal names, That were not born to die.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

How many, once lauded in song, are given over to the forgotten; and how many who sung their praises are clean gone long ago!