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Quotations about books
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Books are one of the few things men cherish deeply. And the better the man, the more easily will he part with his most cherished possessions. A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum — of both books and money. But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money.
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) American author, literary critic, and playwright
Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (6 Apr 1903)
(Source)
Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
E. M. Forster (1879-1970) English novelist, essayist, critic, librettist [Edward Morgan Forster]
Commonplace Book (1985) [ed. Gardner]
(Source)
The owner of the library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for it. Anyone and everyone is owner of the library who can read the same through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom they enter with ease and take residence and force toward paternity and maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American poet
Leaves of Grass, Preface (1855)
(Source)
Reprinted on the wall of Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini, Greece.
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
But beware you be not swallowed up in books: An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
John Wesley (1703-1791) English cleric, Christian theologian and evangelist, founder of Methodism
Letter to Joseph Benson (7 Nov 1768)
(Source)
If the books which you read are your own, mark with a pen or pencil the most considerable things in them which you desire to remember. Then you may read that book the second time over with half the trouble, by your eye running over the paragraphs which your pencil has noted. It is but a very weak objection against this practice to say, I shall spoil my book; for I persuade myself that you did not buy it as a bookseller, to sell again for gain, but as a scholar, to improve your mind by it; and if the mind be improved, your advantage is abundant, through your book yields less money to your executors.
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) English theologian and hymnodist
Logic on the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1724)
(Source)
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
No furniture so charming as books.
Sydney Smith (1771-1845) English clergyman, essayist, wit
(Attributed)
Quoted in Lady Holland (Smith's daughter), Memoir, Vol. 1, ch. 9 (1855). See also Beecher.
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.
Books, that paper memory of mankind.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher
The Art of Literature, ch. 4 “On Men of Learning” [tr. Saunders (1851)]
(Source)
Ah, Stefan, give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.
Anne Rice (b. 1941) American author [b. Howard Allen Frances O'Brien]
The Witching Hour, Part 2 (1990)
(Source)
Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.
Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) Italian scholar and poet [a.k.a. Petrarch]
Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul [De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae] [tr. Elton (1893)]
Alt. trans.: "Books have brought some men to knowledge, and some to madness. whilst they drew out of them more than they could digest." [tr. Dobson (1791)]
Alt. trans.: "Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness, who drew from them more than they could hold." [tr. Rawski (1991)]
The thing about Tom Clancy is that you can start reading a Tom Clancy book when the plane takes off in London and you’re still reading it when the plane lands in Sydney. And then you can use it to beat snakes to death.
My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations is, me judice, no book — it is a plaything.
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) English novelist, satirist, poet, merchant
Crochet Castle, ch. 9 (1831)
(Source)
“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you re-read.
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.
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Books to the ceiling, books to the sky.
My pile of books are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American lawyer, politician, US President (1861-65)
(Attributed)
(Source)
Recounted in the Pennsylvania School Journal, Vol. 46, #7 (Jan 1898) as an anecdote from a clergyman printed in the New York Tribune.
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
The book has been man’s greatest triumph. Seated in my library, I live in a Time Machine. In an instant I can be transmitted to any era, any part of the world, even to outer space. I have lived in every period of history. I have listened to Buddha speak, marched with Alexander, sailed with the Vikings, ridden in canoes with the Polynesians. I have been at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and Louis XIV; I have been a friend to Captain Nemo and have sailed with Captain Bligh on the Bounty. I have walked in the agora with Socrates and Plato, and listened to Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount.
Best of all, I can do it all again, at any moment. The books are there. I have only to reach up to the shelves and take them down to relive the moments I have loved.
There is more reason for saying grace before a new book than before dinner.
The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don’t like ’em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in ’em, ’cause that’s cool.
Your borrowers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
People often say that a set of books looks ugly if all volumes are not in the same format, but I was impressed to hear the Abbot Koyu say, “It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling complete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better.”
I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital. and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American political philosopher, polymath, statesman, US President (1801-09)
Letter to James Madison (Sep 1821)
(Source)
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
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.
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. […] It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be —
I had a mother who read to me.
Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you, to tell you that they have something inside their covers that will be good for you, and that they are willing and desirous to impart it to you.
William Gladstone (1809-1898) English Liberal politician, Prime Minister
“The Workman’s Opportunities,” speech, Saltney (26 Oct 1889)
(Source)
I have asked Mr Bernstein,
who is an excellent blesser
to bless you all and say
that in a country where Illiteracy is on the rise
and the economy is sinking low
and Chastity is out the window
it is comforting to know
that though the frost is on the pumpkin
and civilization is on the skids
you guys are ferociously working underground
smuggling books into the hands of kids.
A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me.
Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) French novelist, poet, playwright
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
(Source)
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.
Consider as well that, however one may sing the praises of those who by their virtue either defend or increase the glory of their country, their actions only affect worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and this is almost more difficult than to originate it in the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but all peoples and all generations. Once this was the task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of Ptolemy. But his library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, and Aldus is building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself.
Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536) Dutch humanist philosopher and scholar
The Adages, “Make Haste Slowly [Festina Lente]” (1508 ed.)
(Source)
Discussing the Aldine Press, the first modern publishing house. In Margaret Mann Phillips, ed., Erasmus on His Times (1967).
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser.
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.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, 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 (1874-1935) American author and cartoonist
The Story of the Yale University Press, ch. 2 (1920)
(Source)