Books Quotes

Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.

John Swartzwelder

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books

Nietzsche

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

Alison Weir

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Then I thought of reading – the nice and subtle happiness of reading…this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Logan Pearsall Smith

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

John Milton

A library is a thought in cold storage.

Herbert Samuel

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Charles Louis de Montesquieu

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are not yet borne.

Joseph Addison

Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.

Colette

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do nd think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula LeGuin

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

Thomas Carlyle

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Edward Gibbon

You may have tangible wealth untold,

Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.

Richer than I you can never be –

I had a mother who read to me.

Strickland Gillilan

No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them, or read a single word.

Sydney Smith

Books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Kurt Vonnegut

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

Michel de Montaigne

The greatest books have more insights than one can absorb in a single reading.

James Pierce

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

Ursula K Le Guin

That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

Louisa May Alcott

I water my mind with books.

Susan Sontag

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

John Waters

Your brain is a muscle and books are the weights.

James Clear

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

Cicero

I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Jane Austen

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cicero

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

Thoreau

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.

Emily Dickinson

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

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Susan Sontag

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

Groucho Marx

If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you.

Terry Pratchett

Beware of the person of one book.

Thomas Aquinas

Read the best books several times. The first time, you hear. The second time, you understand. The third time, you learn. The fourth time, you think. After enough reading, the first reading of any book feels like its fourth.

orangebook

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

William Osler

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

My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.

Shane Parrish

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

John Ruskin

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

For books are more than books, they are the life,

The very heart and core of ages past,

The reason why men lived and worked and died,

The essence and quintessence of their lives.

Amy Lowell

I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

C S Lewis

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

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Jane Smiley

Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.

Thea Dorn

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.

Dr Seuss

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

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Umberto Eco

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

Bill Patterson

It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

Donna Tartt

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

E B White

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

I love books. I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas. I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.

Nnedi Okorafor

Books were my pass to personal freedom.

Oprah Winfrey

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

Francois Mauriac

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

Austin Phelps

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

C S Lewis

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Aldous Huxley

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Carl Sagan

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore.

Henry Ward Beecher

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

P J O’Rourke

Books are gateways into other worlds and other minds into which you cannot otherwise travel.

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

Francis Bacon

Buying books isn’t spending, it’s investing.

Sven Schnieders

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Charles Dickens

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

John Green

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Anna Quindlen

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Mortimer J Adler

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Emerson

Words are life.

Markus Zusak

Books are absent teachers.

Mortimer J Adler

When I had nothing, I had books.

Jola Tankoka

Read more books and fewer articles.

Morgan Housel

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

Somerset Maugham

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Emerson

In a good book the best is between the lines.

Swedish Proverb

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Tolstoy

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Joseph Joubert

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

Anne Herbert

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Toni Morrison

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

Mark Twain

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Desiderius Erasmus

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

Lin Yutang

A book worth reading is worth buying.

John Ruskin

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

Emerson

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Nietzsche

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

David Quammen

Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness?

Saran MacLean

So many books, so little time.

Frank Zappa

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

Dr Seuss

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Ernest Hemingway

Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted.

Marcus Aurelius

A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.

C S Lewis

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.

Maya Angelou

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – books.

Emily Dickinson

I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.

Elon Musk

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Franz Kafka

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Alain de Botton

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

A book is something that can be read ten years after publication. A real book, twenty. Otherwise it is a magazine report with bookbinding.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Let just as many books be acquired as are enough, but none for mere show.

Seneca

As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Schopenhauer

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

Great books teach you something every time you read them.

Angela Jiang

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

Henry Ward Beecher

I would rather read the 100 best books over and over again until I absorbed them, rather than read all the books.

Naval Ravikant

The right book at the right time will speak to you in a way the right book at the wrong time just won’t.

Naval Ravikant

My library is an archive of longings.

Susan Sontag

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

Margaret Fuller

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

Neil Gaiman

I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

Books are the training weights of the mind.

Epictetus

Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

William Hazlitt

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Alain de Botton

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in.

Arthur Schopenhauer