Books Quotes

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

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

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

In 'Huckleberry Finn,' I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.

Antiphon, as another man gets pleasure from a good horse, or a dog, or a bird, I get even more pleasure from good friends. And if I have something good, I teach it to them, and I introduce them to others who will be useful to them with respect to virtue. And together with my friends I go through the treasures of wise men of old which they left behind written in books, and we peruse them. If we see something good, we pick it out and hold it to be a great profit, if we are able to prove useful to one another.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; 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.

Reading gave me hope.

I predict that this will be the greatest book ever and it will sell more than any other book in history

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Some books we read, tho' few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For...things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

I admit that I haven't read everything in my library, but I feel smarter just walking in it!

What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?

Ink is the great cure for all human ills.

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

Be awesome! Be a book nut!

I have read your book, and I disapprove.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

You and I will always be friends." "Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.

A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.

Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids!

Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading