"Life being very short, and the quiet hours few,
we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books."

—John Ruskin

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel,
read only a page."

—St. Augustine

"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

"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."

—John Milton

"What we become depends on what we read
after all the professors have finished with us.
The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

—Thomas Carlyle

"In the best books, great men talk to us,
give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
God be thanked for books.
They are the voices of the distant and the dead,
and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them,
the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest."

—William Ellery Channing

"We all know that books burn—yet we have
the greater knowledge that 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

"We need the books that effect us like a disaster,

that grieve us deeply,

like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves,

like being banished into forests far from everyone . . . .

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

—Franz Kafka

"A book, too, can be a star,
a living fire to lighten the darkness,
leading out into the expanding universe."

—Madeleine L'Engle

"The man who doesn't read good books
has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

—Mark Twain

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.
I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. . . .
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."

—Henry David Thoreau

"The love of learning,
the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books."

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A truly great book should be read in youth,
again in maturity and once more in old age,
as a fine binding should be seen by morning light,
at noon and by moonlight."

—Robertson Davies

"The profit of books
is according to the sensibility of the reader;
the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine,
until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Books—the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity."

—George Steiner

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles
the vision and stengthens our most fatal tendency—
the belief that the here and now is all there is."

—Allan Bloom

"All good books have one thing in common—
they are truer than if they had really happened."

—Ernest Hemingway

"No man can be called friendless
who has God and the companionship of good books."

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here or there on a tree
which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life,
of our first experiences. But . . . to tell the reader anything
that his own imagination and insight have not already discovered
would need not a page or two of preface but a volume or two of autobiography."

—Virginia Woolf

"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."

—W. B. Yeats

"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, Sr.

"If you can get the right book at the right time
you taste joys—not only bodily, physical,
but spiritual also, which pass one
out above and beyond one's miserable self,
as it were through a huge air,
following the light of another man's thought.
And you can never be quite the old self again."

—T. E. Lawrence

 

"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 J. Adler

"You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks
like ladders to sniff books like perfumes
and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
May you be in love every day for the next . . .
20,000 days. And out of that love,

remake a world."

—Ray Bradbury