Books

"When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it."

"That roars so loud and thunders in the index."

"A beggar's book out-worths a noble's blood."

"Keep * * * thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend."

"We turn'd o'er many books together."

"I had rather than forty shillings, I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here."

"That book in many's eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story."

"O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast; Who plead for love and look for recompense More than that tongue that more hath more express'd."

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

"And deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book."

"And in such indexes (although small pricks To their subsequent volumes) there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come at large."

"You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin."

"What this town has not given her the book will provide: a sheep, a wilderness of new solutions"

"Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter."

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

"When we turn to secular literature it is impossible to name a list of books that will fit each individual need. Writers and educators have attempted to do so intermittently since Sir John Lubbock first published his list of “One Hundred Best Books.” Usually such a list is of little value except to reflect the writer’s personality."

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."

"When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."

"Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards."

"Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being someone else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement."

"But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable."

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

"A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East."

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading now, or surrender yourself to self-ignorance."

"He touched other books, scanned other volumes, all old friends, all holding for him some special grace, some captured memory. He read a story for the hundredth time and enjoyed it as if he had read it but once. He fingered worn bindings and yellowed pages, blinking as his eyes refused their duty until he had had a surfeit of reading and put away the books and sat, staring through the high windows at the late-afternoon sky beyond."

"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."

"Un livre est une bouteille jetée en pleine mer sur laquelle il faut coller cette étiquette: attrape qui peut."

"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

"Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book."

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."

"Putting books on an inaccessible platform is nearly as effective at destroying books as the shredder."

"I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about."

"People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."

"Unlearned men of books assume the care, As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair."

"A dedication is a wooden leg."

"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn."

"That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit."

"Homo unius libri."

"Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate, depend upon books."

"You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand."

"But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation."

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

"Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."

"The Wise (Minstrel or Sage,) out of their books are clay; But in their books, as from their graves they rise. Angels—that, side by side, upon our way, Walk with and warn us!"

"Hark, the world so loud, And they, the movers of the world, so still!"

"We call some books immortal! Do they live? If so, believe me, TIME hath made them pure. In Books, the veriest wicked rest in peace."

"All books grow homilies by time; they are Temples, at once, and Landmarks."

"There is no Past, so long as Books shall live!"

"In you are sent The types of Truths whose life is THE TO COME; In you soars up the Adam from the fall; In you the FUTURE as the PAST is given— Ev'n in our death ye bid us hail our birth;— Unfold these pages, and behold the Heaven, Without one grave-stone left upon the Earth."

"Some said, John, print it, others said, Not so; Some said, It might do good, others said, No."