Quotations by Subject

   Books

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. -Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator and author (1902-2001)

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned. -Heinrich Heine Almansor

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. -Saint Augustine

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. - Francis Bacon, English philosopher, essayist and statesman.

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one. -Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. -Walter Bagehot, economist and journalist (1826-1877)

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.-Walter Benjamin, critic and philosopher (1982-1940)

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. -Jesse Lee Bennett

The covers of this book are too far apart. - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

Literature is the language of society, as speech is the language of man.-Louis de Bonald, philosopher and politician (1754-1840)

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. -James Bryce

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. -Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. -Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. -William Ellery Channing, clergyman and writer (1780-1842)

A book is a garden carried in the pocket. -Chinese proverb

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2.Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic (1772-1834)

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, writer (1913-1995)

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. -Clarence Day, writer, (1874-1935)

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. -Charles W. Eliot, educator (1834-1926)

Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

Literature encourages tolerance - bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities. -Northrop Frye, writer (1912-1991)

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time in reading it. -Moses Hadas, teacher and author (1900-1966)

Easy reading is damned hard writing. -Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. -Gilbert Highet, writer (1906-1978)

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned. -Heinrich Heine

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do on chewing gum. -Elbert Hubbard

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. -Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

Why don't you write books people can read? - Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)

A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us. -Franz Kafka, Austrian Writer (1883-1924)Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. -Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author (1880-1968)

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. -Stephen King, novelist (1947- )

What is reading, but silent conversation. -Walter Savage Landor, writer (1775-1864)

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, / And all the sweet serenity of books. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to anothermind. -James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum. -Henry Miller, novelist (1891-1980)

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind. -Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, author (1689-1762)

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life. -Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957) [Parnassus on Wheels, 1917]

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. -Christopher Morley, writer
(1890-1957)

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. -Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. -Salman Rushdie, writer (1947- )

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. -Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

A library is thought in cold storage. -Herbert Samuel, politician and diplomat (1870-1963)

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.-Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)

Reading is seeing by proxy. -Herbert Spencer, philosopher (1820-1903)

Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them. -Philip Dormer Stanhope, statesman and writer (1694-1773)

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.--Edward Thorndike

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. -Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)

No two persons ever read the same book. -Edmund Wilson, critic (1895-1972)

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure. -Peregrine Worsthorne

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare. -Kenko Yoshida, essayist (1283-1352)