Books

"There is an undeniable correlation between functional illiteracy, poverty, and crime—in fact, eleven states predict their future need for prison cells based on the reading levels of their fourth graders. Books can change lives, yes, and so can the lack of them."

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them."

"Observe reader your old books, for they are the fountains out of which these resolutions issue."

"Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food."

"I sometimes think there is nothing so lovely as an artistically-designed book."

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age."

"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 of darkness, 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 hearts of men centuries dead. And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden."

"Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us a model of how we should always read."

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."

"The book is one of the springs of creative individualism, that individualism which, in these uncertain times, remains the guardian angel of human society. For five hundred years the book has been, for the solitary mind, an incomparable instrument of uplift and liberation."

"Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself."

"And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

"All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men."

"If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that."

"I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

"I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass...than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun...to read the book of God...the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe."

"After Gutenberg, realms of everyday life once ruled and served by Memory would be governed by the printed page. ...A man could now refer to the rules of grammar, the speeches of Cicero, and texts of theology, , and morality without storing them in himself. The printed book... [was] superior in countless ways to the internal invisible warehouse in each person. ...When they were equipped with indexes, as ...sometimes ...by the sixteenth century, then the only essential feat of Memory was to remember the order of the alphabet. Before the end of the eighteenth century the... index... had become standard. The technology of Memory retrieval... played a much smaller role in the higher realms of... knowledge. Spectacular feats of Memory became mere stunts."

"How can one be in the limelight and still write? Books deserve compassion. They are delicate creatures born to be accepted or rejected as a whole; they can't endure dissection under the microscope of the pathologist. Most writers are as vulnerable as their work."

"Shelving books improperly is as good as stealing them. It is actually much worse."

"Learning hath gained most by those books by which the Printers have lost."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"No one disputes the fine points of natural beauty—waterfall, wildflower—but books of any sort are sustained less through universal acclamation than through the excited, often contradictory, exchanges of their readers."

"Ivy had always cherished books for the stillness they allowed in a world that valued fast, unforgiving progress regardless of the human expense; there was a magical link between words on the page and the vivid images that simultaneously unfolded in her mind."

"'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in't."

"Some Books are onely cursorily to be tasted of."

"Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache."

"Books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them."

"... the notion that everybody has at least one good book in him is misleading. To draw out from one's own interior the material for a book, and to objectify it as a book, requires more literary skill than is given to most of us, and more courage than is discoverable in the whole history of indiscretion."

"Gone are the days of highlighting books featuring two dads or, as astonishing as it is to think about, the simple controversy of breaking out definitions of gay, bisexual, and transgender in a glossary. Now kids get dozens of sex and “gender” options to choose from, including queer, genderqueer, sapphic, panromantic, and two-spirit. They also get a new term to designate anyone who isn’t queer, “allocishet,” which the “Read With Pride” guide defines as, “people whose gender and sexuality are privileged by society.”"

"Books are the greatest and the most satisfactory of recreations. I mean the use of books for pleasure. Without books, without having acquired the power of reading for pleasure, none of us can be independent, but if we can read we have a sure defence against boredom in solitude."

"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."

"What are my books but one plea against " man's inhumanity to man "—to woman—and to the lower animals?"

"This book is just right-- // I'm reading by flashlight deep into the night // Deliciously thirsty to see how it ends. // Books are such mind-thrilling // spine-tingling friends."

"Books give not wisdom where was none before, But where some is, there reading makes it more."

"Books are published with an expectation, if not a desire, that they will be criticised in reviews, and if deemed valuable that parts of them will be used as affording illustrations by way of quotation, or the like, and if the quantity taken be neither substantial nor material, if, as it has been expressed by some Judges, "a fair use" only be made of the publication, no wrong is done and no action can be brought."

"Wahrhaftig, der Umgang mit schlechten Büchern ist oft gefährlicher als mit schlechten Menschen."

"If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

"In every reading life, certain works are talismans, especially those read in early years."

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

"You recollect what Hobbes used to say, "that if he had read as many books as other men, he should have been as ignorant as they," clearly implying that reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought."

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books."

"Justin Wadlow, a professor at the French Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV) in Amiens and a well-known scholar of comics, explained how books combining texts and comics as a new form of art have been used to spread deep ideas and raise awareness of social issues. He suggested that the essence of [the] Tai Ji Men culture may also be illustrated and presented to the world through these new media."

"Sometimes you need more than just one book, more than just one . Sometimes you need a whole . A book town is simply a small town, usually rural and scenic, full of bookshops and book-related industries. The movement started with in in Wales in the 1960s ..., picked up speed in the 1980s and is continuing to thrive in the new millenium."

"A man will turn over half a library to make one book."

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."