Old hosts give entertainment to sharks. [ Proverb ]

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd unfledged comrade. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. [ Lady Montagu ]

Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world. [ G. W. Curtis ]

Music is not merely a study, it is an entertainment: wherever there is music there is a throng of listeners. [ Bryant ]

No one is qualified to entertain, or receive entertainment from others, who cannot entertain himself alone with satisfaction. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

If the soul be happily disposed, every thing becomes capable of affording entertainment, and distress will almost want a name. [ Goldsmith ]

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us in solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. [ J. Collier ]

It is not in the power of every one to taste humor, however he may wish it; it is the gift of God! and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. [ Sterne ]

To men addicted to delights, business is an interruption; to such as are cold to delights, business is an entertainment. For which reason it was said to one who commended a dull man for his application: No thanks to him; if he had no business, he would have nothing to do. [ Steele ]

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose. [ Balzac ]

The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]