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)
- Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- A book is a gift you can open again and again.--Garrison Keillor
- 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 a uniquely portable magic.--Stephen King
- Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.--Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)
- Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.--Susan Sontag
- 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 quietest and most constant of friends, and the most patient of teachers.--Charles W. Eliot
- Books are the shoes with which we tread the footsteps of great minds.--Unknown
- Books are whispers of the past heard well into the future.--Keri Douglas (Ode)
- Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together---just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people---people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.--E. B. White (letter to Troy Michigan library April 4, 1971)
- The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.--Pablo Neruda
- 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
- Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.--Alfred Whitney Griswold (New York Times, 24 February 1959)
- 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
- For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, "Here I am, read me." Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.--Maya Angelou (on Facebook, Oct. 30. 2010)
- From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings.--Helen Hayes ("On Reflection")
- Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.--Stephen King
- I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books-whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.--Cecelia Ahern
- 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 cannot live without books.--Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, June 10, 1815)
- 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 was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.—Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Shadow of the Wind)
- 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)
- If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading I would spurn them all.--Francois Fenelon
- If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.-–Haruki Murakami
- In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.--Mark Twain
- In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.--Mortimer Adler
- In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.--Ben Aaronovitch
- 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
- Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.--Kathleen Norris
- 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 man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.--Lois Lowry
- 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
- Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart.-- William Henry Channing
- The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.--Samuel Butler
- Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.--Louis L'Amour (Matagorda)
- One always has riches when one has a book to read.--Jacqueline Winspear (A Lesson in Secrets
- 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
- Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.--John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
- There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.—-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.--Walt Disney
- These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.--Gilbert Highet
- 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 friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, books only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow.--Washington Irving
- 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
- Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.--Hermann Hesse
- 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 borrow a book but you get to keep the ideas.--Unknown
- 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
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This page last updated April 1, 2017.