Books

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
-- Henry Miller

A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.
-- Daniel Boorstin

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
-- Edward P. Morgan

A book is a friend; a good book is a good friend. It will talk to you when you want it to talk, and it will keep still when you want it to keep still; and there are not many friends who know enough to do that.
-- B. A. Billingsly

A book is a gift you can open again and again.
-- Garrison Keillor

A book that is shut is but a block.
-- Thomas Fuller

A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.
-- Mark Twain

A dirty book is rarely dusty.
-- Author Unknown

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-- G. K. Chesterton

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.
-- Margaret Fuller

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

-- Norman Cousins

A library is a hospital for the mind.
-- Anonymous

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
-- P. J. O'Rourke

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
-- Author Unknown

Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
-- Cicero

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
-- Benjamin Franklin

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

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way
-- Caroline Gordon

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
-- Mark Twain

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
-- Paxton Hood

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

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
-- Charles W. Eliot

Books are Y2K compliant
-- Unknown

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled: “This could change your life”.
-- Helen Exley

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence
-- Jan Morris

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
-- Arnold Lobel

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
-- Abraham Lincoln

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
-- George Steiner

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
-- Charles Kingsley

Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.
-- John Lyly

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
-- Virginia Woolf

For me it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend, and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief.
-- Fernandez de Andrada

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
-- Groucho Marx

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

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
-- Augustine Birrell

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better than book or orator.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
-- William Lyon Phelps

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.
-- Albert Einstein

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
-- Groucho Marx

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly... the reading habit had got me securely.
-- H. G. Wells

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.
-- Ann Richards

I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.
-- Unknown

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

-- Charles Lamb

I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am...I, am a librarian!!

-- From the movie, The Mummy

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

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

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
-- Jane Hamilton

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.
-- Sutton Elbert Griggs

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
-- Charles Caleb Colton

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
-- Edith Sitwell

Never judge a book by its movie.
-- J. W. Eagan

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
-- Mary Wortley Montagu

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
-- Richard Steele

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
-- Harold Bloom

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.
-- Harriet Martineau

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

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.
-- François Mauriac

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
-- Moses Hadas

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
-- Dorothy Parker

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
-- Alfred Hitchcock

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
-- James McCosh

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
-- Lord Chesterfield

The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.
-- Dr. Seuss

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
-- Katharine Mansfield

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
-- Holbrook Jackson

The wise man reads both books and life itself.
-- Lin Yutang

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

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.
-- Donald J. Adams

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

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
-- G.K. Chesterton

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.
-- Jim Fiebig

There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
-- Joe Ryan

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

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.
-- Chinese Saying

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
-- Edmund Burke

TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.
-- Author Unknown

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
-- Austin Phelps

What can I say? Librarians rule.
-- Regis Philbin

What's a book?
Everything or nothing.
The eye that sees it all.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.
-- Marie de Sevigne

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
-- Henry Ward Beecher

You can cover a great deal of country in books.
-- Andrew Lang

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
-- Paul