Quotes arranged alphabetically by author
“Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.”–Dawn Adams
“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 (1672-1719)
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you”. –Mortimer Jerome Adler (1902-2001)
“If you drop gold and books, pick up the books first, then the gold.”–Anonymous
“Oh! For a book, and a cosy nook
And oh! for a quiet hour,
When care and strife and worry of life,
Have lost their dreaded power,
When you read with zest the very best
That mind to mind can give,
And quaff your joy without alloy,
And feel it is good to live.”
–Anonymous
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered”.–Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
“Books that make us feel, touch a nerve that goes deep into our own lives. Whether that nerve is warm and comforting, scared and anxious, happy or sad, it still reminds us to examine who we are.”–Laura Backes
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” –Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
“Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this .
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.
I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life.
The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”
–Julian Barnes (1946- )
“Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.”–E.S. Barrett
“He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.”–Barrow
“Some men are so selfish that they read a book or go to a concert for their own sinister pleasure, instead of doing it to improve social conditions, as the good citizen does when drinking cocktails or playing bridge.”–Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)
“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”–Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”–Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
“Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore!”–Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
“Child! Do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
–Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
“When I am dead, I hope it may be said,
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
–Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953)
“Books are not men and yet they stay alive.”–Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
“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 (1907-2000)
“The covers of this book are too far apart.”–Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
“A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.”–Sven Birkert (1951- )
“A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.”–Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004)
“I have always come to life after coming to books.”–Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
“When writers die they become books, which is afterall, not too bad an incarnation.”–Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
“Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large, –where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning’s dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!”–Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.” –Samuel Butler
“After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.”–Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
“All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, it is all lying in magic preservation in the pages of books.”–Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
“Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.”–Oswald J. Chambers (1874-1917)
“Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.”–Robert Chambers (1802-1871)
“A good title is the title of a successful book.”–Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
“It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds… They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.”–William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”–Marcus T. Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought — asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”–Jeremy Collier (1650-1726)
“Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good book.”–Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
“Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.” –George Crabb (1754-1832)
“The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.”–Frank Crane (1873-1948)
“A good book has no ending”.–R. D. Cumming
“Next, in importance to books are their titles.”–Paul Davies
“If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.”–Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
“She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command.”–Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
“There are many people — happy people, it usually appears — whose thoughts at Christmas always turn to books. The notion of a Christmas tree with no books under it is repugnant and unnatural to them.”–Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
“A truly great book should be read in youth, once again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”–Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
“The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.”–Christopher Dawson
“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.”–Clarence Day
“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, aye even of faith, must needs become a lover of books.”–Richard De Bury (1287-1345)
“All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals the remedy of books.”–Richard De Bury (1287-1345)
“Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.”–Richard De Bury (1287-1345)
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main… and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.”–Walt Disney (1901-1966)
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own”.–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
“Never judge a book by its movie.”–J. W. Eagan
“A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.”–Umberto Eco
“I would say that last weekend was my lost weekend… and the culprit was a book…” –Therese Eiben
“Some books leave us free, and some books make us free”. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
“A man who buys a book is not just buying a few ounces of paper, glue and printer’s ink; he may be buying a whole new life.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights
— Quoted in Bar Hebraues’ Ethicon
St. EPHREM the Syrian (303-373)
“Stories are discoveries. Our ordinary lives are going on around us, but as we read stories, the ordinary drops away and, for a moment, the veil is pierced.”–Elizabeth Evans
“Books are not rolls, only to be devoured when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.” –Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999)
“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before”. –Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999)
“Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend”. –William Feather (1889-1981)
“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 got ourselves.”–E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
“What wild desires, what restless torments seize,
The hapless man who feels the book disease…”
–John Ferriar (1761-1815) (from the poem Bibliomania)
“A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.”–Margaret Fuller
“Three possessions should you prize: a field, a friend, and a book.”–Hai Gaon (Head of Bet Din in 998)
Wrote commentaries on Torah and Talmud until his death at age 99.
“I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.”–George Robert Gissing (1857-1903)
“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books — even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. They seem to tell you that they have got something inside their covers that will be good for you, and that they are willing and desirous to impart to you. Value them much.”–William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)
“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”–Caroline Gordon (1895-1981)
“The first time I read an interesting book, it is to me just as if i had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”–Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)
“What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books -if you bring to it not the obligations of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer.–David Grayson –“Adventures in Contentment”
“A book is a book only when it is read; otherwise it is a bundle of gathered sheets of soiled paper.”–Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948)
“This book fills a much-needed gap.”–Hadas
“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.” — Elizabeth Hardwick
“If you have one child who does not like to lend books,
and another child who does, leave your library to the second, even if that child is younger. ”
–Judah of Regensburg, Sefer Hasidim
13th century, work on ethics
“The printed page illuminates the mind of man and defies, as far as anything sublimary can, the corrosive hand of time.”–Denys Hay (1915-1994)
“I have had more pleasure in reading the adventures of a novel than I ever had in my own.”– William Hazlitt
“Wherever books are burned, men too are eventually burned.”–Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
“All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy. the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”–Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
“Books may well be the only true magic.”–Alice Hoffman (1952- )
“The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.”–Oliver Wendell Holmes (1802-1894)
“The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, “The medicines of the soul.”–Paxton Hood (1820-1885)
“Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.”–Frank McKinney ‘Kin’ Hubbard (1868-1930)
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
“The proper study of mankind is books.”–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
“A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.”–George Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)
“The newest books are those that never grow old.”–George Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)
“I’ve traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous: saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I’ve been where no-one’s been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks,
All with one library ticket,
To the wonderful world of books.”
–Janice James
“Books constitute capital.”–Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
“I cannot live without books.”–Thomas Jefferson to John Adams in 1815 after selling his books to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress
“A blessed companion is a book, — a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend, a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.”–Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
“Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.”–Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in one hand, are the most useful after all.”–Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.”–Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.”–Joineriana
“The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”–Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us… We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” –Franz Kafka (1884-1924)
“The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine — but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.”–Sir Arthur Keith (1866-1955)
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” — Stephen King (1947- )
“Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.” — Stephen King (1947- )
“Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.”–Thomas ã Kempis (1380-1471)
“Borrowers of books –those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.”–Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”–Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
“Novels, when well written, tell you more about life than the most sophisticated computerized sociology.”–Rosemarie Wittman Lamb (New York Times – June 22, 1975)
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think or feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become”. –Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”–Caroline A. Lejeune (1897-1973)
“A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” –Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
“Books are what connect the generations of humans over thousands of years”. –Alan Lightman (1948- )
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”–Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
“The choice of books, like that of friends, is a serious duty. We are responsible for what we read as what we do.”–John Lubbock
“Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.”–Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898)
“A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books…. Children learn to read being in the presence of books.”–Heinrich Mann (1871-1950)
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, and inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”–Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
“The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.”–W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.”–James McCosh (1811-1894)
“Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”–Henry Miller (1891-1980)
“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”–John Milton (1608-1674)
“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” –John Milton (1608-1674)
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” –John Milton (1608-1674)
“Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.” –S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914)
“Books and marriage go ill together.”–Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622-1673)
“Books relieve me from idleness, rescue me from company, blunt the edge of my grief. They are the comfort and solitude of my old age.”–Michel de Montaigne (1553-1592)
“Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.”–John Morely
“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face…….. It is one of the few havens remaining where (your) mind can get both provocation and privacy.”–Edward. P Morgan (1910-1993)
“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.” –Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
“Good fiction should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens, something in it that opens a door and points the way”. –Toni Morrison (1931- )
“A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.”–William Murray
“A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.”–Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
“Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”–Alfred E. Newton (1863-1940)
“Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting for one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”–Kathleen Norris (1880-1966)
“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.”–Theodore Parker (1810-1860)
“Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.”–Walter Pater (1839-1894)
“… To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping.” –Henry Peacham (1576-1643)
“A book that furnishes no quotations is, me judice, no book – it is a plaything.”–Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”–Austin Phelps (1820-1890)
“Books do furnish a room.”–Anthony Powell (1905-2000)
“Books speak even when they stand unopened on a shelf. If you would know a man or woman, look at their books, not their software”. –E. Annie Proulx (1935- )
“Books and friends should be few but good”. —Proverb
“Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.”–Mordecai Richler (1931-2001)
“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.”–Henry C. Rogers
“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons.” –Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) message to the American Booksellers Association – April 23, 1942
“Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable.”–Jean Rostand (1894-1977)
“To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.”–John Ruskin (1819-1900)
“If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying”. –John Ruskin (1819-1900)
“All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. –John Ruskin (1819-1900)
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours.”–J.D. Salinger (1919- )
“Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.”–Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
“The business of the novelist is not to chronicle great events but to make small ones interesting.”–Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
“To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them. As it is, the act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content.”–Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
“What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.”–Andre Sinyavsky (1925-1997)
“No furniture is so charming as books… Even if you never open them, or read a single word; the plainest row of cloth or paper covered books is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved etagere or sideboard.”–Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
“Some books have to be reread right away… you love it so much that you don’t want to leave it.” –Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
“Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books.”–Philip D. Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”.–Sir Richard Steele (1672-1759)
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life”. –Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
“A good novel transports the reader to another world, showing that what seems immutable in his own
society might only be a local custom.” –David Streitfeld
“A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.”–William Styron (1925-2006)
“Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.”–J. Swartz
“Books, the children of the brain.” –Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
“Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.”–Sir William Temple (1628-1699)
“An elegant sufficiency, content, retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.” –James Thomson (1700-1748)
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”–Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations… Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.” –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written.” –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“Cover your bookcases with rugs and linens of fine quality;
preserve them from dampness and mice and injury;
for it is your books that are your true treasure.”
Ibn Tibbon (1150-1230?) Spanish Jewish Scholar
“Make books your companions; let your bookshelves be your gardens: bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and myrrh. And when your soul be weary, change from garden to garden, and from prospect to prospect.”–Ibn Tibbon (1150-1230?) Spanish Jewish scholar
“Never refuse to lend books to anyone who cannot afford to purchase them, but lend books only to those who can be trusted to return them. “–Ibn Tibbon (1150-1230?) Spanish Jewish Scholar
“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 (1912-1989)
“Books are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”–Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989)
“A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever”. –Martin Tupper
“Classic. A book which people praise and don’t read.”–Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life” –Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I’ve lost some friends I truly cherished
For whom I’m greatly sorrowed
These friends aren’t humans who have perished
They’re books that humans borrowed.
– Unknown
“Good books are the warehouses of ideas.”–H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
“There is no such thing as a moral or a immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”–Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
“The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” –Virginia Woolf
“Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.”–Sir Peregrine Worsthorne (1923- )
“Friends can betray you but books are always loyal.”–Wang Gho Zhen
“Fiction nurtures the imagination and gives the reader a creative vision of the diversity of life’s possibilities. This is fiction’s greatest power.” –Kazumi Yumoto
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“Books are what the world values as representing Tao. But books are only words, and the valuable part of words is the thought therein contained”. –Zhuangzi a.k.a. Chuang-tzu – Chinese philosopher and teacher
Fictionophile 