Quote Lady's Quotes by Subject, Libraries

Libraries

Access to knowledge is the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.--Toni Morrison
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.--Kurt Vonnegut
Anyone who feels that wisdom has failed in our age need only enter a library. They will find there the recorded thoughts of hundreds of men and women who believed in a larger world than the one defined in each generation by human failure. They will find literature, which teaches us, again and again, how to reimagine the world.--Barry Lopez
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 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)
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)
Borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.--Charles Lamb
But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?--James Boswell (Boswell on the Grand Tour)
Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.--Toby Forward
Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you --- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.--Isaac Asimov (Letter to Troy Michigan library March 16, 1971)
A culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?--Neil Gaiman (Sandman)
Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written. And guess what? It's all available. All you have to do is go to the library.--Jim Rohn (The Treasure of Quotes)
A few Books well chosen, and well made use of will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library.--Thomas Fuller (Introductio ad Prudentiam)
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.--Neil Gaiman
He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.--James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
The health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.--Carl Sagan
Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.--Jetzy Kosinski
I always had my nose stuck in a book, a history book mostly. Of course, the main reason you read a book is to get a better insight into the people you're talking to. There were about three thousand books in the library downtown, and I guess I read them all, including the encyclopedias. I'm embarrassed to say that I remembered what I read, too.--Harry S. Truman
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.--Sandra Cisneros
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.--Bernard Keble Sandwell
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.--Alexander Smith (Dreamthrop)
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.--Jorge Luis Borges
I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.--Franklin D. Roosevelt
I have spent a reasonable percentage of my life in libraries - I like the hush.--Robin Ince
I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.--Luigi Barzine (O America)
I ransack public libraries and find them full of sunk treasure.--Virginia Woolf
I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.--Neil Gaiman
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library, and I’d written a thousand stories.--Ray Bradbury
I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there was the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.--Patrick Ness
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.--Marcus Tullius Cicero
In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.--Germaine Greer
It may not seem like much, but think of the consequences. One overdue library book today, the collapse of the universe by the end of the week.--Gareth Roberts (The English Way of Death)
It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.--William Makepeace Thackeray ("The Round Room Comes to an End" New York Times Book Review)
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.--Samuel Johnson
Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.--Ursula K. Le Guin (The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination)
Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.--Charles Medawar
Libraries are the thin red line between civilisation and barbarism.--Neil Gaiman
Librarians open up the world. Knowledge is useless if you don't even know where to begin to look. How much more can you discover when someone can point you in the right direction, when someone can maybe even give you a treasure map, to places you may not have even thought you were allowed to go? This is what librarians do.--Patrick Ness (UK Carnegie acceptance speech, June 23, 2011)
Libraries and librarians do what they do so quietly and efficiently that it's easy to take them for granted. But we do so at our peril. If we don't safeguard them, we will wake up one day and realize that we've lost something very, very precious, essential to democracy, to literacy, to our quality of life. A world without libraries is unthinkable.--Erica Silverman
Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.--Neil Gaiman
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting.--Germaine Greer
Libraries are the thin red line between civilisation and barbarism.--Neil Gaiman
Libraries have always seemed magical to me. You walk into a library and suddenly you have access to the greatest thoughts and words from every period of human history. Hours of discovery await you.--Anne Mackin
[L]ibraries in the United States can contribute to a future that values and protects freedom of speech in a world that celebrates both our similarities and our differences, respects individuals and their beliefs, and holds all persons truly equal and free.--(Libraries: An American Value (statement by the American Library Association, 2/3/1999))
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.--Barack Obama (speech to the American Library Assn., June 2005)
Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving out quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.--Sidney Sheldon
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.--Anne Herbert
The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.--Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
The library houses thousands of imaginations, thoughts of the living and the dead. A good day in the library means you see the world differently when you depart.--Robin Ince
The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.--Polly Horvath (My One Hundred Adventures)
A library is a gateway to others' minds, hearts, and lives.--Tamora Pierce
A library is a hospital for the mind.--Caitlin Moran
A library is a palace of dreams.--M. C. Beaton
A library is a path to the future--find yours there.--Mary Higgins Clark
A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.--Alan Dershowitz
A library is a platform upon which we catch trains to Every Where and Any Place, Another Time and Across Space. All aboard!--Esme Raji Codell
[A library] is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you---and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.--Isaac Asimov (Letter March 16, 1971)
A library is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure. Librarians are the majesties who loan the jewels of measure. They welcome to the kingdom the young and old of reapers and reign among the riches as the wondrous fortune keepers.--Pam Munoz Ryan
A library is an adjustable wrench for opening the head.--M. T. Anderson
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.--Caitlin Moran ("Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls")
A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.--E. B. White (letter to Troy Michigan library April 4, 1971)
The library is perceived as a safe place, but it is not a safe place in terms of ideas. It's a marketplace of ideas.--Barbara Berg (Juneau Empire, 9/24/09)
A library is the first step of a thousand journeys, portal to a thousand worlds.--Orson Scott Card
A library is the only single place you can go to learn something new, be comforted, terrified, thrilled, saddened, overjoyed, or excited all in one day. And for free.--Amy Neftzger
The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.--Carl Rowan
A library is thought in cold storage.--Herbert Samuel
A library is where ideas sleep between covers, waiting for you to discover them.--Lois Ehlert
A library is where you go to escape the world outside and to explore the worlds within.--Elizabeth Winthrop
A library is where you meet fascinating characters you never forget.--Judy Blume
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
The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.--Gloria Estefan
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life.--Norman Cousins (American Library Association Bulletin 10/1954)
The library, with its tall bays and overhanging gallery, looked east and was already rather dark. Harriet found it restful.--Dorothy L. Sayers (Busman's Honeymoon)
Man, who would have thought being a librarian could be so tough?--John Whelpley ("Harper 2.0" Andromeda [television program])
More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world--a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward.--Barack Obama (speech to the American Library Assn., June 2005)
Most homes valued at over $250,000 have a library. That should tell us something.--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine - January 27, 2004)
Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?--Neil Gaiman
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.--Malcolm X
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.--Lawrence Clark Powell (At the Heart of the Matter)
Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.--Walter Savage Landor
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.--Barbara W. Tuchman (The New Yorker, 1986)
Now, there is a wonderful thing in this world called 'foresight.' It is a gift treasured above all others because it allows one to know what the future holds. most people with foresight end up wielding immense power in life, often becoming great rulers or librarians.--Jonathan Auxier (Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes)
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.--Albert Einstein
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.--Lady Bird Johnson
Places of incredible glamour, possibility, power, excitement and pleasure. Love your libraries!--Stephen Fry (on Twitter, 2/3/12)
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.--Mark Twain
There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.--John Quincy Adams
They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?--Sara Sheridan
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.--Barbara Tuchman
To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.--Cicero
To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads.--Jon Bing
To make a library
It takes two volumes
And a fire.
Two volumes and a fire,
And interest.
The interest alone will do
If logs are few.--Carolyn Wells (The Rest of My Life)
To Whom It May Concern: Welcome to the library where no one will tell you what to read or tell you what to think.... Meanwhile a book over there on a shelf will be glancing at you sideways getting up the courage to ask you out make you laugh make you cry make you fall in love.--Meg Rosoff
The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.-–Paula Poundstone
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.--Shelby Foote
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.--T. S. Eliot
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.--John Lubbock
What in the world would we do without our libraries?--Katharine Hepburn
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.--Archibald MacLeish
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.--Walter Cronkite
When an old man dies, a library burns down.--African Proverb
When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.--Keith Richards
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.--Ray Bradbury (Mojave Magazine)
You could go to a secret corner of the library where the only people talking are between the covers of books. They speak so softly that you can only hear them in your head as you read about forests and oceans and deserts and caverns and museums and a thousand other things.--Douglas Wood (A Quiet Place)
You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!--Russell T. Davies (Tooth and Claw)
Your library is your portrait.--Holbrook Jackson (Maxims on Books and Reading)