books quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Albert Camus: 

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.

Amy Lowell: 

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.
Boston Athenaeum


Amy Lowell: 

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words. 
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed


Ann Richards: 

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.

Barbara Tuchman: 

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Bertrand Russell: 

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Cicero: 

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Daniel J. Boorstein: 

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

Denise Levertov: 

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Elizabeth Drew: 

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Elizabeth Hardwick: 

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 a moral illumination.

Emily Dickinson: 

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away.

Francis Bacon: 

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed on and digested.

Harriet Martineau: 

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

Henry G. Strauss: 

I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

Henry Miller: 

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. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Henry Ward Beecher: 

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Katharine Mansfield: 

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Kathleen Norris: 

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Lenore Hershey: 

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.

Louisa May Alcott: 

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

Margaret Fuller: 

A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

Mark Twain: 

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

Mark Twain: 

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mortimer Adler: 

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: 

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Nick Bantock: 

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were our demigods.

Norman Cousins: 

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.

Oscar Wilde: 

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satelite instead of a system.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Theodore Parker: 

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.

Thomas Jefferson: 

[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

William Ellery Channing: 

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.