"Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean."
— Christopher Morley, "Parnassus on Wheels"
[A] book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other "modern means of communication" ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.
— Joseph Wood Krutch
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
— Salman Rushdie
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
— Arab proverb
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.
— Edward P. Morgan
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
— Franz Kafka
A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books — storms, fogs, zephyrs.
— Anatole Broyard
A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.
— Anatole Broyard
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
— Cicero
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been, it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the choicest possessions of men.
— Thomas Carlyle
Another damned, thick, square, book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?
—William Henry (Duke of Gloucester), upon receiving the second volume of Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
— Edwin P. Whipple
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
— Henry Ward Beecher
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
— Barbara Tuchman
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to humanity, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
— Joseph Addison
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
— Bert Williams
Books have led some to learning and others to madness.
— Francesco Petrarch
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
— Paul Valery
Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.
— James Alonzo Bishop
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
— Alfred Whitney Griswold
Books—the children of the brain.
— Jonathan Swift
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
— Thomas à Kempis
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
He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred of a book; he hath not eat paper as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished, he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.
— William Shakespeare, "Love's Labor Lost"
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.
— George Plimpton
If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.
— Thelma Green
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
— William Hazlett
If I read a book that cost me and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains in the world.
— Tom Peters
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
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and ... if they had been any better, I should not have come.
— Raymond Chandler
It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
— Jane Hamilton
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.
— S.I. Hayakawa
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
— Charles Scribner, Jr.
Libraries are not made; they grow.
— Augustine Birrell
Men do not understand books until they have had 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 Loomis Pound
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
No two persons ever read the same book.
— Edmund Wilson
October is crisp days and cool nights, a time to curl up around the dancing flames and sink into a good book.
— John Sinor
People disagreeing everywhere you look,
Makes you wanna stop and read a book.
— Bob Dylan
Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.
— A. Whitney Brown
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
— Angela Carter
Reading is a luxury in the same way that eating and breathing are.
— G. Armour Van Horn
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
— Joseph Addison & Sir Richard Steele
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
— George Bernard Shaw
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
— W.H. Auden
Student: This class is called Form and Theory of the Short Story but all we do is sit around and talk about the books. Where's the form and the theory?
Raymond Carver: Well, that's a good question. I guess I'd say that the point here is that we read good books and discuss them. And then you form your own theory.
That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
— Amos Bronson Alcott
The book is good
Which puts me in a working mind
— Emerson
The difference between where you are today and where you'll be five years from now will be found in the quality of the books you read.
— Jim Rohn
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency — the belief that the here and now is all there is.
— Allan Bloom
The greatest book is not the one whose messages engraves itself on the brain, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by various essences, until it becomes a great conflagration.
— Romain Rolland
The greatest gift is a 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
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
— François Marie Arouet (Voltaire)
The intellect is a dioecious plant, and books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
— James Russell Lowell, "Nationality in Literature"
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
— Mark Twain
The perils of ambulatory reading. If you have never said Excuse me to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.
— Sherri Chasin Calvo
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
— Andrew Ross
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
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
— Edith Wharton
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
— Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"
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 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 heart of men centuries dead.
— Clarence Day
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
— James Price
There are more books about books than about any other subject.
— Montaigne
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
— Gilbert Highet
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
— Marcel Proust
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
— Walt Disney
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
— Kenko Yoshida
Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what can you believe?
— Bullwinkle J. Moose
What I say is a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul.
— Neil Gaiman, "American Gods"
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, mouldering books.
— Andre Sinyavsky
What makes a book live? A book lives through the passionate recommendation of one reader to another.
— Henry Miller
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
— Erasmus
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
— Henry Ward Beecher
Woe be to him that reads but one book.
— George Herbert
You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.
— Charles Jones
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
— Lionel Trilling
