The book is man's best invention so far.
John Adams
The more one reads, the more one sees we will have to read.
John Adams
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
Mortimer J. Adler
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides though the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya Angelou
Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise; the monster and the rocket.
W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
Reading maketh a full man.
Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted.
Francis Bacon
Where is human nature so weak but in a bookstore?
H. W. Beecher
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
Certain books come to meet one, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
The process of writing -any form of creativity- is a power intensifying life.
Rita Mae Brown "Starting From Scratch"
But after I had read for memory, I read for hope.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hand.
James Burke
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
To put it simply, our minds are changed by the books we read; our perceptions and feelings are altered by the technologies, such as television, through which we recieve ideas; and our ideas of social behavior and the workings of the world-galaxies, environments, and the biology of our bodies - are restructured by these advances of knowledge we call culture.
Orson S. Card "Songmaster"
. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside the story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but with their own.
Orson S. Card
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Cervantes
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
William Ellery Channing
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
John Cheever
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.
G. K. Chesterton
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese Proverb
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Wiston Churhill
A room without book, like a body without a soul.
Cicero
Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
Jeremy Collier
Books are a guide for youth and an entertainment for age.
Jeremy Collier
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
A good book has no ending.
R. D. Cumming
We are made whole
By books, as great spaces and the stars.
Mary Carolyn Davies
A book is never a masterpiece; it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
This Traverse may
the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll-
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.
Emily Dickinson
Why are we reading if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened aand its deepest mystery probed? Why are we reading if not in the hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? what do we ever know that is higher than that power that which, from time to time, seizes our lives and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death catch us bu surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lives like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to woke up; insterad we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader -- not the fact that its raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E. L. Doctorow
The more you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll.
Dr. Suess
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessable and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot
Stories are medicine. . . They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained is stories.
Clarissa P. Estes, PH.D
Computers will never take the place of books. You can't stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf.
Sam Ewing
It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have got ourselves.
E. M. Forrester
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 Goden
Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.
Goethe
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
Coroline Gordon
It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all you can.
Jane Hamilton
A book of quotations. . . can never be complete.
Robert M. Hamilton
The greatest gift is a 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 mortal illumination.
Elizabeth Hardwick
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after your are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterward it all belongs to you: the good, the bad, the ecstasy the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
Robert Heinlein
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
Sir Arthur Helps
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.
Leonore Hershey
These are not not books, lumps of lifeless paper; but minds alive on the shelves.
Gilbert Highet
Books may well be the only true magic.
Alice Hoffman
The best of a book is not the thought that 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
Life transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks
this will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do on chewing gum.
Elbert Hubbard
I cannot live without books.
Thomas Jefferson
I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson
The worst thing about new books is that they keep you from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on a skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also then be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Franz Kafka
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself.
Alfred Kazin
I am a part of everything I have read.
John Keirman
The unread story is not a story, it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it makes it live: A live thing, a story.
Ursala K. LeGuin
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursala K. LeGuin
Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursala K. LeGuin
Reading means borrowing.
Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg
A book is a mirror: If an ass purrs into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
Abraham Lincoln
I have not written this book to teach the reader anything new. Rather, it is my aim to direct the reader's attention to certain well-known and generally accepted truths, for the very fact that they are well-known and generally accepted is the cause of their being overlooked.
Moshe Hayyim Luzzetto
Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books - they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past.
Esther Maynell
A book is. . . your own time machine that can transport you from the present to the past and into the future.
Sol M. Malkin
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Katherine Mansfield
To the habitual reader, reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he will make do with the advertisement of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory.
W. Somerset Maughan
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobubli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wonder through this most diverting and stimulating of words in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. Menken
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.
Henry Miller
A good book is the previous life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life.
John Milton
There is no remedy so easy as books, which they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
Lady M. W. Montagu
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assauge.
Montesquieu
As long as the unread stack stays under 100, it can't be considered stockpiling.
Miriam Nadel
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a book.
Neitzsche
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin
In the absence of a decent time machine, fiction remains the most sturdy vehicle for visiting other eras.
Tom Nolan
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of the day makes that day happier.
Kathleen Norris
Stories ae for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when meory is erased, when there is nothing to remember.
Tim O'Brien
It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them.
William Osler
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
Literacy is a very hard skill to acquire, and once acquired it brings you endless heartache - for the more you read, the more you learn of life's intimidating complexity and confusion. but anyone who can learn to grunt can watch TV. . . which teaches that life is simple, and happy endings come to those whose hearts are in the right place.
Spider Robinson
He who cannot read, cannot reason.
Spider Robinson
Books are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
Dorothy L. Sayers
. . . writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within. Writing works better at cleaning up the mess than doing laundry or making beds.
Linda Grey Sexton "Searching for Mercy Street"
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
B. F. Skinner
The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Books are . . . funny little portable peices of thought.
Susan Sontag
Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body.
Sir Richard Steele
Fiction is wonderful because you can explore the consequences of wishes -- good ones and bad ones -- without quite letting on. Aah the freedom of disguise! but dare I let you all see? dare I let myself see? in a way it's almost more frightening to turn to fiction, you delve deeper, sometimes it feels too deep and I think often I don't go in because I'm afraid to come out who will I be? and when I take the trek alone will you be there on the other side? will I want to stay inside the fiction?
Audrey Beth Stein
Beware the man of one book.
St. Thomas Aquinas
A great book book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
The heart of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
Anthony Trollope
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virgina Woolfe
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandonned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
Peregrine Worthstone
When only I begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.
Onzia Yezierska
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Roger Zelazny
Literature and butterfiles are the two sweetest passions known to men.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
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