Book Quotations
Celebrate
National Book Month
with this comprehensive collection of Book Quotations.Laptop Batteries
National Book Month
with this comprehensive collection of Book Quotations.
- " That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit. "
-- A. Bronson Alcott - "A book without an index is like a compass without a needle."
-- Anonymous - "A library is a hospital for the mind."
-- Anonymous - "Book: A garden carried in a pocket."
-- Arabian Proverb - "The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is. "
-- Sir James M. Barrie - "Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."
-- Henry Ward Beecher - "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested."
-- Francis Bacon - "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
-- Jorge Luis Borges - "A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
-- Henry Brooke - "When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began."
-- Rita Mae Brown - "Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought. "
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton - "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
-- Edmund Burke - "A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. "
-- Albert Camus - "In books lies the soul of the whole past time."
-- Thomas Carlyle - "The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity."
-- Thomas Carlyle - "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books. "
-- Thomas Carlyle - "Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind. "
-- Robert Chambers - "The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. "
-- Warren Chappell - "Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "The way a book is read- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it."
-- Norman Cousins - "A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."
-- Chinese Proverb - "Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."
-- Cicero - "He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are. "
-- C. C. Colton - "The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. "
-- Frank Dane - "All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books."
-- Richard De Bury - "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away, Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry."
-- Emily Dickinson - "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."
-- Walt Disney - "My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free."
-- Kirk Douglas - "Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower - "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends: they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."
-- Charles W. Eliot - "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. "
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "T'is the good reader that makes the good book."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
-- Erasmus - "When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day."
-- Jean Fritz - "The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book."
-- Northrup Frye - "Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost. "
-- Thomas Fuller - "Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking."
-- Edward Gibbon - "In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read."
-- S. I. Hayakawa - "Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
-- Heinrich Heine - "Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal. "
-- Lenore Hershey - "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."
-- Paxton Hood - "Everyone who know how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, multiple the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting."
-- Aldous Huxley - "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. "
-- Elizabeth Hardwick - "Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. "
-- John Harington - "Life transforming ideas have always come to me through books."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes - "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 - "A book might be written on the injustice of the just. "
-- Anthony Hope - "The worst thing about reading new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
-- Joseph Joubert - "We find little in books but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things."
-- Joseph Joubert - "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 - "The end of reading is not more books but more life."
-- Holbrook Jackson - "I cannot live without books."
-- Thomas Jefferson - "Literature is my Utopia."
-- Helen Keller - "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book."
-- Charles Kingsley - "Beware the man of one book."
-- Latin Proverb - "Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and a houseful of books isn't poor."
-- Sam Levenson - "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read."
-- Abraham Lincoln - "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."
-- Arnold Lobel - "For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives. "
-- Amy Lowell - "What is reading, but silent conversation. "
-- Walter Savage Landor - "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. "
-- Harper Lee - "The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. "
-- Katherine Mansfield - "Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. "
-- Anthony Marcel - "Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare. "
-- Harriet Martineau - "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life."
-- W. Somerset Maugham - "Outside of a dog a book is man's best. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
-- Groucho Marx - "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 - "The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think."
-- James McCosh - "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. "
-- Richard McKenna - "Deep versed in books and shallow in himself. "
-- John Milton - "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
-- John Milton - "He who destroys a good book kills reason itself."
-- John Milton - "One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction. "
-- Lance Morrow - "A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations. "
-- William Murray - "I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."
-- Malcolm X - "Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."
-- Kathleen Norris - "It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them. "
-- William Osler - "If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures."
-- Harry A. Overstreet - "Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. "
-- Ezra Pound - "A library should be like a pair of open arms."
-- Roger Rosenblatt - "When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it."
-- Marie de Sevigne - "A library is thought in cold storage. "
-- Herbert Samuel - "Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out. "
-- Arthur Schopenhauer - "I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage. "
-- Charles de Secondat - "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. "
-- Giorgos Seferis - "We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading."
-- B. F. Skinner - "People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
-- Logan Pearsall Smith - "It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind."
-- Sydney Smith - "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
-- Richard Steele - "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
-- Dr. Seuss - "My library was dukedom large enough."
-- William Shakespeare (The Tempest) - "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life. "
-- Robert Louis Stevenson - "A good word is like a good tree whose root is firmly fixed and whose top is in the sky."
-- The Koran - "My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. "
-- Dylan Thomas - "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all."
-- Henry David Thoreau - "A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."
-- Martin Tupper - "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
-- Mark Twain - ""Classic": A book which people praise but don't read."
-- Mark Twain - "My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water."
-- Mark Twain - "Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own. "
-- Raoul Vaneigem - "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. "
-- Jessamyn West - "Books had instant replay long before televised sports. "
-- Bert Williams - "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 - "Choose an author as you choose a friend. "
-- Sir Christopher Wren - "Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written. "
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin - "I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little."
-- Voltaire - "I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly, the reading habit had got me securely."
-- H.G. Wells - "Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."
-- John Witherspoon - "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
-- Virginia Woolf
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