Library
/ Book Collection Quotes
The true
university these days is a collection of books.
- Thomas Carlyle
Make thy
books thy companions. Let thy cases and shelves be thy
pleasure grounds and gardens.
- Judah
ibn-Tibbon (12th century)
To add a
library to a house is to give that house a soul.
- Cicero
Libraries
are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient
saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion
or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
- Bacon
Give thy
mind to books and libraries, and the literature and
lore of the ages will give thee the wisdom of sage and
seer.
- Newell D. Hillis
I
go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
- Alexander
Smith
A library
of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and
all things that are desirable cannot be compared to
it.
- Richard de Bury
It is, however,
not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school,
but to the library, that we must go for the completion
of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age
the intellectual wealth of the world.
- Owen Meredith, from
Inspirational Quotes About Libraries, Librarians and
Book Collections
The only
true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house
open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which
will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you
can carry beyond the grave is wisdom.
- J. A. Langford
No furniture
so charming as books.
- Sydney
Smith
Medicine
for the soul.
- Inscription over the door
of the Library at Thebes
Perhaps
no place in any community is so totally democratic as
the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
- Lady Bird Johnson
And even
should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure
the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains
to preserve and restore light
and liberty to them.
- Thomas Jefferson
A
library is thought in cold storage.
-
Herbert Samuel
Libraries
are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell
Good as it
is to inherit a library, it is better
to collect one.
- Augustine
Birrell
Nothing sickens
me more than the closed door of a library.
- Barbara Tuchman
My library
Was dukedom large enough.
- Shakespeare,
The Tempest
Your
library is your portrait.
-
Holbrook Jackson
They are
the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.
- William Shakespeare, Love's
Labour's Lost
A circulating
library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical
knowledge! It blossoms through the year!
- Richard Brainsley Sheridan
Knowing I
lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
No
place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity
of human hopes than a public library.
- Samuel Johnson
I
myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated
and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream
restaurant where every dish from all of the world's
cuisines, past and present, was available on request.
- Luigi Barzini
Second
hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have
come together in vast flocks of variegated feather,
and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the
library lack.
- Virginia Woolf
But
what can a man see of a
library being one day in it?
- James Boswell
The dissemination
of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of civilization.
- John F. Budd
The man who
has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate
himself objectively, and is justified in believing in
his own existence.
- Augustine
Birrell
What is a
great love of books? It is something like a personal
introduction to the great and good men of all past times.
Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their
shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library
I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know
if I put questions to these books they will answer me
with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been
left in them by the great men who have left the books
with us.
- John Bright
Come, and
take choice of all my library,
And so beguile thy sorrow.
- William Shakespeare, Titus
Andronicus
Life is like
a library owned by an author. In it are a few books
which he wrote himself, but most of them were written
for him.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
It
is impossible to enter a large library... without feeling
an inward sensation of reverence, and without catching
some sparks of noble emulation, from the mass of mind
which is scattered around you.
-
James Crossley
Quotes
About Books
If
minds are truly alive they will seek out books,
for books are the human race recounting its memorable
experiences, confronting its problems, searching
for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures.
- Harry A. Overstreet |
 |
All that
mankind has done, though, gained or been: it is lying
as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
- Thomas Carlyle
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 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 heart of men centuries dead.
- Clarence Day
I have lost
all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means
to me now -- only that place where the books are kept.
- John Steinbeck
Books
are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
- Edwin P. Whipple
The walls
of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind
of insulation against the present world of disasters.
- Ross MacDonald
I like books.
I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling,
when I get in their presence, that a stable-boy has
among horses.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
A
good book is the best of friends.
- English
Proverb
The books
that help you most are those which make you think the
most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading:
but a great book that comes from a great thinker-- it
is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and
with beauty.
- Theodore Parker
Books
are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.
- George William Curtis
Reading
Quotes
The man who
does not read good books has no advantage over the man
who can't read them.
- Mark Twain
The
reading of all good books is like conversation with
the finest men of past centuries.
- Descartes |
 |
People say
that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
The great
objection to new books is that they prevent our reading
old ones. - Joseph Joubert
In reading,
as in eating, an appetite is half the feast.
- Anonymous
All that
we have read and learned, all that has occupied and
interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler
or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual
society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests
in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.
- Philip Gilbert Hamilton
If I had
read as much as other men I would have known no more
than they.
- Thomas Hobbes
Reading to
kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string
quartet. - Sean Wilentz, Reader's
Quotation Book from
Cool
Quotes About Libraries Books and Knowledge
Quotes
for Recommended Book Lists
The fact
of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is
knowing what to read.
- Jacques Ellul
Show me the
books he loves and I shall know / The man far better
than through mortal friends.
- S. Weir Mitchell
People
will not be better than the books they read.
- Bishop Potter
If we encounter
a man of great intellect, we should ask him what books
he reads.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading a poor
book is an opportunity lost of reading a good one.
- Anonymous
One
sure window into a person's soul is his reading list.
- Mary B. W. Tabor
It
is not the reading of many books which is necessary
to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.
- Richard Baxter
It is with
books as it is with men -- a very small number play
a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.
- Voltaire
We
should accustom the mind to keep the best company by
introducing it to only the best books.
- Sydney Smith
Choose an
author as you would a friend.
- Wentworth Dillon
Let us read
thoughtfully; this is a great secret in the right use
of books.
- George Gilfillan
Read the
best books first, or you may not have a chance to read
them at all.
- Henry David Thoreau
Indiscriminate
reading is unprofitable to the mind.
- Latin Proverb
Books like
friends, should be few and well-chosen. Like friends,
too, we should return to them again and again -- for
like true friends, they will never fail us -- never
cease to instruct -- never cloy.
- Joineriana
Be
as careful of the books you read as the company you
keep.
- Paxton Hood
Quotes
About Finding Information
He is wise
who knows the sources of knowledge -- where it is written
and where it is to be found.
- A.A. Hodge
I find that
a great part of the information I have was acquired
by looking something up and finding something else on
the way.
- Franklin P. Adams
Knowledge
is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we
know where we can find information upon it.
- Samuel Johnson
One must spend time
in gathering knowledge to give it out richly.
- Edmund Clarence Stedman
Research
means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.
- Charles F. Kettering
As
a general rule, the most successful man in life is the
man who has the best information.
- Benjamin
Disraeli
To know where
you can find anything, that in short is the largest
part of learning.
- Anonymous
With the
enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature,
we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection,
judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to
exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book,
but it requires high skill to make an index.
- Rossiter Johnson
Censorship
Quotes
Don't join
the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal
faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every
book.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The dirtiest
book of all is the expurgated book.
- Walt Whitman
"There
is no book so bad,” said the bachelor, “but something
good may be found in it.
- Cervantes, Don Quixote
You do ill
if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do
not understand.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Censorship,
like charity, should begin at home: but unlike charity,
it should end there.
-
Claire Booth Luce
Without censorship,
things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
- William Westmoreland
A wicked
book is the wickeder because it cannot repent.
- English Proverb
To limit
the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading
of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be
either fools or slaves.
- Claude Adrien Helvetius
Whoever would
do good in the world, ought not to deal in censure.
We ought not to destroy, but rather construct.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Funny
Library Quotes
A book may
be compared to your neighbor; if it be good, it cannot
last too long; if bad, you cannot
get rid of it too early.
-
Henry Brooke
Book lovers
never go to bed alone.
- Unknown
There are
two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the
kind you make up.
- Rex Stout
Seventy million
books in America's libraries, but the one you want to
read is always out.
- Tom Masson
"Classic":
A book which people praise but don't read.
- Mark Twain
Knowledge
is free at the library. Just
bring your own container.
- Unknown
Book -- what
they make a movie out of for television.
- Leonard Louis Levinson
On
how many people's libraries, as on bottles from the
drugstore, one might write: "For external use only."
-
Unknown
Quotes
About Borrowing Books
Never lend
books, for no one ever returns them; the only books
I have in my library are books that other people have
lent me.
- Anatole France
Borrowers
of books -- those mutilators of collections, spoilers
of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
- Charles Lamb
The
reason why borrowed books are seldom returned, is that
it is easier to retain books themselves than what is
inside of them.
- Gilles Ménage
Hard-covered
books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered
book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get
mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five
cent books are different.
- John
Steinbeck
