Quotes About Books
Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave.
At home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a solace, in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides vertue, it gives at once , grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.
Joseph Addison
Addison, Joseph. Spectator. 1711..
Two Lives Are Yours
Books I think
Are extra nice.
Through books you live
Not once but twice.
You are yourself
And you are things
With fur or fins
Or shells or wings,
As big as giants,
Small as gnats,
As far as stars
As close as cats.
You live today
And long ago.
The future, too,
Is yours to know.
You're multiplied,
Expanded, freed.
You're you and also
What you read.
Richard Armour
Armour, Richard. Two Lives Are Yours.1973.
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
Margaret Atwood
Atwood, Margaret. On Writing Poetry (Waterstone's Poetry Lecture) delivered at Hay On Wye, Wales, June 1995
Reading maketh a full man.
Francis Bacon
Bacon, Francis. Of Studies (1597) in Essay's from Everyman's Library. Dent, London: 1962.
All humanity is passion: without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Honoré de Balzac
But the feeling I have, you know, is that I’ll never come close to reading all, or even a thousandth- a billionth- of the books I’d probably love if I ever got to them.
Dave Barry
Shwartz, Ronald B. For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most. Grosset/Putnam. New York: 1999..
I grew up in a small town with a very small library. But the books in the library opened a large place in my heart. It is the place where stories live. And those stories have been informing my days, comforting my nights, and extending possibilities ever since. If that library had not been there, if the books - such as they were - had not been free, my world would be poor, even today.
Marion Dane BauerAmerican Library Association. Books Change Lives: Quotes to Treasure. Booklist Publications: 1994.
We have preserved the Book, and the Book has preserved us.
David Ben-Gurion
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
Libraries are not made; they grow.
Augustine Birrell
Birrell, Augustine. Book-buying from Obiter Dicta, second series. Stock, London: 1887.
The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Cole, John Y. “In Memoriam: Daniel J. Boorstin.” Perspectives Online 42:6 (2204).
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
Richard de Bury
Bury, Richard de. The Love of Books: The Philobiblon. 1345. Translated by E. C. Thomas. De La More Press, London: 1903.
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Roman orator, philosopher, and politician. 1st Century B.C.
The truth is that every book we read, like every person we meet, has the
capacity to change our lives. And though we can be sure our children will meet people, we must, must create, these days, their chance to meet books.
Susan Cooper
American Library Association. Books Change Lives: Quotes to Treasure. Booklist Publications: 1994.
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
The libraries of America are and must ever remain the home of the free, inquiring minds. To them, our citizens - of all ages and races, of all creeds and political persuasions - must ever be able to turn with clear confidences that there they can freely seek the whole truth, unwarped by fashion and uncompromised by expediency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Letter to the American Library Association's Annual Conference.” Los Angeles: 1953.
Someone said, "the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S. Eliot
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
When I get a little money I buy books;
and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus
Erasmus, Deciderius. Dutch priest, Humanist, and editor of the New Testament. 1469-1536.
Let my temptation be a book.
Eugene Field
Field, Eugene. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. IndyPublish.com: 2002.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept of the stretch.
Augustus Hare
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
The printed page illuminates the mind of a man and defies, as afar as anything sublimary can, the corrosive hand of time.
Denys Hay
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
William Hazlitt
Hazlitt, William. Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles. 1870
The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1873). Paterson, Edinburgh: 1885.
Much of whatever appreciation or understanding I have of myself and of other people I owe to the books I have read.
Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
American Library Association. Books Change Lives: Quotes to Treasure. Booklist Publications: 1994.
"Once asked whether he had read a certain book cover to cover, Johnson is quoted by his biographer James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) as replying scornfully, 'No, Sir. Do you read books through?'"
Samuel Johnson
Kacirk, Jeffrey. Forgotten English Calendar.2006.
The book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka
Bettman, Otto L. The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes, & Anecdotes. David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston: 1987.
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "Morituri salutamus" (1875). The Poetical Works ed. By T. Hutchinson. New edition by E. DeSelincourt. Oxford University Press, London: 1959.
I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.
Groucho Marx
Marx, Groucho. American comedian. 1890-1977.
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think if that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.
David McCullough
McCullough, David. “No Time to Read?”.
The first word Edmund G0sse said was not “mama” or “dada” but “book.”
Tom Raabe
Raabe, Tom. Bilioholism. Fulcrum Publishing. Golden, Colorado: 2001.
I am the book
I'll be your friend,
stay by your side,
contradict you,
make you laugh or teary-eyed,
On a sun-summer morning.
I'll spark you,
help you sleep,
bring dreams
you'll forever keep
On a dappled-autumn afternoon.
I'll warm you,
keep you kindled,
dazzle you,
till storms have dwindled
On a snow-flaked winter evening.
I'll plant you,
a spring-seeding
with bursting life
while you are reading.
I am the book
you are needing.
Tom Robert Shields
Shields, Tom Robert. I Am The Book. Highsmith Inc.:2000.
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
Paul Sweeney
Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara W. Tuchman
McCullough, David. “No Time to Read?”
The man who does not read books has not advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain
Twain, Mark. American humorist and writer. 1835-1910.
I conceive that a knowledge of books is the basis on which all other knowledge rests.
George Washington
Washington, George. First American president. 1732-1799.
Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you.
Winnie the Pooh
Milne, A.A. "The House At Pooh Corner." 1928.