It is a good thing to start life
with a small number of really good books
which are your very own.
-Arthur Conan Doyle
Anyone who has a book collection
wants for nothing.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
-Chinese Proverb
When I get a little money I buy books;
and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
-Desiderius Erasmus
A room without books
is like a body without a soul.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
Books are not made for furniture,
but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
-Henry Ward Beecher
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers,
my books attain a collective dignity.
-E. M. Forster
Books are humanity in print.
-Barbara Tuchman
All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been:
it is all lying in magic preservation
in the pages of books.
-Thomas Carlyle
Books are the ever burning lamps
of accumulated wisdom.
-George William Curtis
Books are the treasured wealth of the world
and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
-Henry David Thoreau
Books in all their variety are often the means
by which civilization may be carried triumphantly forward.
-Winston Churchill
Books can truly change our lives:
the lives of those who read them,
the lives of those who write them.
Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew
about the world and about themselves.
-Lloyd Alexander
A man is known by the books he reads.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Generally speaking, men are influenced by books
which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well,
or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are predisposed to accept.
-Carl Becker
Be not content with the best book;
seek sidelights from the others;
have no favourites.
-John Dalberg-Acton
Each new book I read
comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book
that is the sum of my readings.
-Italo Calvino
I no more remember the books I have read
than the meals I have eaten,
but they have made me.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books open your mind,
broaden your mind and strengthen you
as nothing else can.
-William Feather
Good books tell the truth,
even when they're about things
that never have been and never will be.
They're truthful in a different way.
-Stanislaw Lem
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it.
It is like falling in love.
-Christopher Morley
There are books...which take rank in your life
with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first time I read an excellent book,
it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend.
When I read a book over that I have perused before,
it resembles the meeting with an old one.
-Oliver Goldsmith
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends
and the most patient of teachers.
-Charles W. Eliot
...the dearest ones of time,
the strongest friends of the soul - BOOKS.
-Emily Dickinson
Oh for a book and a shady nook.
-John Wilson
The love of learning, and sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Books have become our dearest companions,
yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims.
-George Henry Lewes
Some of the sweetest hours of life, on retrospect,
will be found to have been spent with books.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Worthy books
Are not companions - they are solitudes:
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
-Philip James Bailey
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts,
nothing helps me so much as running to my books.
They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
-Michel de Montigne
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
-Rebecca Solnit
The burning soul, the burden'd mind,
In books alone companions find.
-Sarah Hale
But a Book is only the Heart's Portrait -
every Page a Pulse.
-Emily Dickinson
Just the knowledge that a good book
is awaiting one at the end of a long day
makes that day happier.
-Kathleen Norris
The best books for a man
are not always those that the wise recommend,
but often those that meet the particular wants,
the natural thirst of his mind,
and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.
-William Ellery Channing
'Tis a good reader that makes a good book;
in every book he finds passages
which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else
and unmistakably meant for his ear.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only important thing in a book
is the meaning it has for you.
-W. Somerset Maugham
A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years
in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened,
the marvels or the abysses it contains,
or the line that seems to have been written for me alone.
-Marguerite Yourcenar
What you like in a book is yourself.
-Haitian Proverb
Finding one's self is a book
is a second birth.
-Anais Nin
I am with book,
as a woman is with child.
-C. S. Lewis
The reading of all good books
is like conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
-Rene Descartes
A truly great book
should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age,
as a fine building should be seen
by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
-Robertson Davies
When a book raises your spirit,
and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts,
seek no other test of its excellence.
-Jean de la Bruyere
A sure sign of a good book
is that you like it more the older you get.
-George Christoph Lichtenberg
A book is a gift you can open
again and again.
-Garrison Keillor
That is a good book, it seems to me,
which is opened with expectation
and closed with delight and profit.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
By and large
books are mankind's best invention.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
My books are my tools,
and the greater their variety and perfection
the greater the help to my literary work.
-Tyron Edwards
Good books are the warehouses of ideas.
-H. G. Wells
The true university these days
is a collection of books.
-Thomas Carlyle
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse,
a party, a company by the way,
a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-Charles Baudelaire
We are always looking for the book
it is necessary to read next.
-Saul Bellow
How many a man has dated a new era in his life
from the reading of a book!
-Henry David Thoreau
The worth of a book
is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
-James Bryce
Books are the bees
which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
-James Russell Lowell
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
-Susan Sontag
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
-Stephen King
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains,
but the thought which it suggests.
-John Greenleaf Whittier
All books are not created equal.
Of what account is a book
that does not carry us away beyond books?
We learn in order to acquire distinctions;
little clues which improve the value of our lives.
Each distinction becomes a fresh new opportunity.
Tune into the information that contains the most distinction.
The best books contain a maximum amount of distinctions
we can use immediately to produce incredible results now.
-David Woolfe
We read books to find out who we are.
What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel
is an essential guide to our own understanding
of what we ourselves may become.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
I suggest that the only books that influence us
are those for which we are ready,
and which have gone a little farther down our particular path
that we ourselves have gone.
-E. M. Forster
No man understands a deep book
until he has seen or lived at least part of its contents.
-Ezra Pound
What one has not experienced
one will never understand in print.
-Isadora Duncan
All books are divisible into two classes:
the books of the hour and the books of all time.
-John Ruskin
A classic is a book
that has never finished what it has to say.
-Italo Calvino
When you reread a classic
you do not see in the book more than you did before.
You see more in you than there was before.
-Clifton Fadiman
The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty
will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vice versa.
-Doris Lessing
You can never step into the same book twice,
because you are different each time you read it.
-John Barton
No two persons
ever read the same book.
-Edmund Wilson
A book, like a landscape,
is a state of consciousness varying with readers.
-Ernest Dimnet
The writer is, after all, only half his book.
The other half is the reader
and from the reader the writer learns.
-P. L. Travers
Any book which is at all important
should be reread immediately.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
You will find most books worth reading
are worth reading twice.
-John Morley
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again,
there is no use reading it at all.
-Oscar Wilde
In the best books, great men talk to us,
give us their most precious thoughts,
and pour their souls into ours.
-William Ellery Channing
The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue
in which the book speaks and our soul replies.
-Andre Maurois
Books let us into their souls
and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
-William Hazlitt
Books are ships
which pass through the vast sea of time.
-Francis Bacon
A great book that comes from a deep thinker
is a ship of thought, deeply freighted with truth and beauty.
-Pablo Neruda
Truly, each new book is as a ship that bears us away
from the fixity of our limitations
into the movement and splendor of life's infinite ocean.
-Helen Keller
A book must be the axe
for the frozen sea within us.
-Franz Kafka
I think we ought to read only the kind of books
that wound and stab us.
If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up
with a blow on the head,
what are we reading it for?
-Franz Kafka
I have always come to life
after coming to books.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Words are only painted fire;
a book is the fire itself.
-Mark Twain
That book is good
Which puts me in a working mood.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best effect of many book
is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
-Thomas Carlyle
A great book should leave you with many experiences,
and slightly exhausted.
You should live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron
A real book is not the one that we read,
but one that reads us.
-W. H. Auden
In the highest civilization,
the book is still the highest delight.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are a finer world within the world.
-Alexander Smith
A good book is the purest essence
of a human soul.
-Thomas Carlyle
I require books as I require air.
-Shalom Asch
I cannot live without books.
-Thomas Jefferson
What matters a book
that cannot transport us beyond all books?
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
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