#Books Quotes

“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

“O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.”

“Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough.”

“Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”

“Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.”

“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.”

“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.”

“The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.”

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.”

“It is a tie between men to have read the same book.”

“The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.”

“An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.”

“No book was ever written down by any but itself.”

“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective store?”

“It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.”

“It is with a good book as it is with good company.”

“Health, south wind, books, old trees, a boat, a friend.”

“In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.”

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

“O, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast,Who plead for love, and look for recompense,More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.”

“But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.”

“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.”

“What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.”

“What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.”

“This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.”

“The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.”

“Come, and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow.”

“Writing a book is an adventure.”

“There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.”

“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.”

“Books are for nothing but to inspire”

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

“I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.”

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”

“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.”

“The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.”

“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”

“If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”

“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.”

“Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward.”

“Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.”

“Already by 1900 I could boast I had written as many books as Moses.”

“If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle them, and, as it were, fondle them. Let them fall open where they will. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas.”

“A room without books is like a life without meaning.”

“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.”

“Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.”

“Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.”

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”