Quote Lady's Quotes by Subject, Books

Books

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.--Ernest Hemingway ("Old Newsmen Writes: A Letter from Cuba" in Esquire December 1934)
All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books. The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read?--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine 2/4/03)
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.--Thomas Carlyle (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History)
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.--Henry Ward Beecher (Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit)
A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.--T. S. Eliot
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a public library...without cost to the reader.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Know Your Library)
A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.--Marguerite Yourcenar (With Open Eyes)
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.--Franz Kafka (letter to Oskar Pollak 1/27/1904)
Book Week brings us together to talk about books and reading and, out of our knowledge and love of books, to put the cause of children's reading squarely before the whole community and, community by community, across the whole nation. For a great nation is a reading nation.--Frederic Melcher
The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this will be in its own uninterrupted way in spite of your good intentions.--William Dean Howells
Books are not dead things but do contain a potency of life ... as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a fial the purest extraction of that living intellect that bred them.--John Milton
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.--Barbara W. Tuchman ("The Book", lecture at the Library of Congresss 10/17/1979)
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.--Jesse Lee Bennett
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.--Joseph Addison
Books are the shoes with which we tread the footsteps of great minds.--Unknown
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Alchemy of Books)
Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books--they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past.--Esther Meynell
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.--Arthur Schopenhauer
A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.--Mark Twain
Do not read good books--life is too short for that--read only the best.--Ernest Dimnet
Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.--Murial Clark
Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.--Stephen King
I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?--Lawrence Clark Powell (You, John Milton)
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.--Groucho Marx
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.--Jorge Luis Borges
I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.--Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World)
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.--John Steinbeck (Steinbeck: a Life in Letters)
I have seen men hazard their fortunes, go on long journeys halfway around the world, forge friendships, even lie, cheat and steal, all for the gain of a book.--A. S. W. Rosenbach
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.--Charles Lamb
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.--E. M. Forster
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.--Anna Quindlen ("Bookshelves" Thinking out Loud)
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.--Emily Dickinson (Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson by Bianchi)
It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.--Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds... In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.--William Ellery Channing
A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books.--Richard de Bury
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.--George Bernard Shaw
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.--Martin Luther
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.--Malcolm X
No furniture is so charming as books.--Sydney Smith
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.--Samuel Butler
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.--Carl Sagan
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.--Katherine Mansfield
A room without books is like a body without a soul.--Cicero
Second-hand are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.--Virginia Woolf (The Art of the Personal Essay)
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.--S. Weir Mitchell
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.--Francis Bacon
Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.--Abraham Lincoln
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.--Kenko Yoshida
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.--Henry David Thoreau
Trusting children and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don't know what might happen.--Susan Ohanian
Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Wilson Library Bulletin)
We are made whole by books, as by great space and the stars.--Mary Carolyn Davies
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea.--Lawrence Clark Powell (Books in my Baggage)
We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.--Joseph Joubert (Pensees)
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.--Austin Phelps
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.--Lawrence Clark Powell (The Little Package)
What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.--Thomas Carlyle
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.--Erasmus
When they ask me at the Post Office if my package contains anything dangerous, I never know quite how to answer. It contains books, and if a book isn't dangerous, then why was it written?--Karen L. Oberst
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life.--Christopher Morley
You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.--Charles "Tremendous" Jones
You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.--C. S. Lewis
You can't tell a book by its movie.--Louis A. Safian (the Book of Updated Proverbs)
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.--Ray Bradbury