Quotations on Books

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

~ Aleister Crowley

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

~ Oscar Wilde

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

~ Abraham Lincoln

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

~ Louisa May Alcott

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.

~ Henry David Thoreau

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideasa place where history comes to life.

~ Norman Cousins

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

~ Theodore Parker

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satelite instead of a system.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every burned book enlightens the world.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

~ Bertrand Russell

If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it.

~ Bertrand Russell

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

~ Albert Camus

A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

~ Margaret Fuller

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

~ Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

~ Mark Twain

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

~ Mark Twain

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 -- of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

~ Henry Miller

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

~ Amy Lowell

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

~ Daniel J. Boorstein

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

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 Adler

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

~ Mortimer Adler

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.

~ William Ellery Channing

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

~ William Ellery Channing

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

~ William Styron

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

~ William Hazlitt

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

~ Sir Francis Bacon

A wicked book cannot repent.

~ Proverbs

Never judge a book by its movie.

~ J.W. Eagan

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

~ W.H. Auden

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

~ John Milton

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

~ Amos Bronson Alcott

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

~ Stephen Vincent Benét