The profit of books is according to
the sensibility of the reader.
The profoundest thought or
passion sleeps as in a mine,
until an equal mind and
heart finds and publishes it.
?Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are good enough in
their own way, but they are a
poor substitute for life.
?Robert Louis Stevenson
Men do not understand books until
they have a certain amount of life,
or at any rate no man understands a
deep book, until he has seen and
lived at least part of its contents.
?Ezra Pound
That is a good book which
is opened with expectation, and
closed with delight and profit.
?A. Bronson Alcott
He who studies books alone will
know how things ought to be, and he who
studies men will know how they are.
?C. C. Colton
Books are but waste paper unless we spend
in action the wisdom we get from thought.
?Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Books are the quietest and most constant
of friends and the most patient of teachers.
?Charles W. Eliot
One can live with the thought of one's
own death. It is the thought of the death
of the words and books that is terrifying
for that is the deeper extinction.
?Lance Morrow
The true University of these
days is a Collection of Books.
?Thomas Carlyle
My education was the liberty I had
to read indiscriminately and all
the time, with my eyes hanging out.
?Dylan Thomas
For books are more than books,
they are the life, the very heart
and core of ages past, the reason why
men worked and died, the essence
and quintessence of their lives.
?Amy Lowell
Outside of a dog, a man's best
friend is a book. Inside of a
dog, it's too dark to read.
?Groucho Marx
Learning hath gained most
by those books by
which the printers have lost.
?Thomas Fuller
I am not a speed reader.
I am a speed understander.
?Isaac Asimov
The printing press is either the
greatest blessing or the greatest
curse of modern times,
sometimes one forgets which it is.
?Sir James M. Barrie
A novel is never anything,
but a philosophy put into images.
?Albert Camus
Books are the blessed
chloroform of the mind.
?Robert Chambers
The flood of print has turned reading into
a process of gulping rather than savoring.
?Warren Chappell
The great American novel has
not only already been written,
it has already been rejected.
?Frank Dane
I heard his library burned down
and both books were destroyed --
and one of them hadn't even
been colored in yet.
?John Dawkins
Never judge a book by its movie.
?J. W. Eagan
The greatest gift is the passion for
reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it
distracts, it excites, it gives you
knowledge of the world and experience
of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
?Elizabeth Hardwick
Books give not wisdom
where none was before.
But where some is, there
reading makes it more.
?John Harington
The best of a book is not the thought
which it contains, but the thought
which it suggests; just as the charm
of music dwells not in the tones
but in the echoes of our hearts.
?Oliver Wendell Holmes
The books we read should be
chosen with great care,
that they may be, as an Egyptian
king wrote over his library,
"The medicines of the soul."
?Paxton Hood
A book might be written on
the injustice of the just.
?Anthony Hope
The Bible remained for me a
book of books, still divine -- but
divine in the sense that all great
books are divine which teach
men how to live righteously.
?Sir Arthur Keith
What is reading, but
silent conversation.
?Walter Savage Landor
Until I feared I would lose it,
I never loved to read.
One does not love breathing.
?Harper Lee
The pleasure of reading is
doubled when one lives with another
who shares the same books.
?Katherine Mansfield
Once we have learned to read,
meaning of words can somehow
register without consciousness.
?Anthony Marcel
Readers are plentiful:
thinkers are rare.
?Harriet Martineau
Any book that helps a child
to form a habit of reading, to make
reading one of his deep and continuing
needs, is good for him.
?Richard McKenna
Deep versed in books
and shallow in himself.
?John Milton
A dose of poison can do its
work but once. A bad book
can go on poisoning
minds for generations.
?William Murray
A library is thought in cold storage.
?Herbert Samuel
Books are like a mirror.
If an ass looks in, you can't
expect an angel to look out.
?Arthur Schopenhauer
I've never know any trouble than
an hour's reading didn't assuage.
?Charles de Secondat
Don't ask me who's influenced me.
A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested,
and I've been reading all my life.
?Giorgos Seferis
My books are water;
those of the great geniuses are wine --
everybody drinks water.
?Mark Twain
Ideally a book would have no
order to it, and the reader would
have to discover his own.
?Raoul Vaneigem
Fiction reveals truth
that reality obscures.
?Jessamyn West
Books had instant replay long
before televised sports.
?Bert Williams
Old books that have ceased to
be of service should no more be
abandoned than should old friends
who have ceased to give pleasure.
?Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
Choose an author as you choose a friend.
?Sir Christopher Wren
Man ceased to be an ape,
vanquished the ape, on the day
the first book was written.
?Yevgeny Zamyatin
It is easier to buy books than
to read them, and easier to read
them than to absorb them.
?William Osler
