Favorite Quotes on Books:Books are not men and yet they stay alive. —Stephen Vincent Benét
A room without books is like a body without a soul. —Cicero
A book is the only immortality. —Rufus Choate
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
—Henry David Thoreau
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. —Mark Twain
A book is a gift you can open again and again—Garrison Keillor
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or
been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages
of books.—Thomas Carlyle
A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.— William Styron
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.— Lord Edward Lytton
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love
breathing.
—Harper Lee
What is reading, but silent conversation.— Walter Savage Landor
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.— Thomas ã Kempis
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
— Joseph Joubert
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 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
Read in order to live.— Gustave Flaubert
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.— Clarence Day
Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.— Richard De Bury
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
— Joseph Brodsky
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.— Barrow
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.— Dawn Adams
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature is the immortality of speech.—August Wilhelm von Schlegel
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them
his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with
invention.
— Ernest Hemingway
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire
structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
— Vaclav Havel
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often
thinks they have.
— Alan Bennett
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to
read.
—Mark Twain
When the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and
statesmen come to receive their rewardstheir crowns, their laurels, their names carved
indelibly upon imperishable marblethe Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not
without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look,
these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), U.S. author. One-sentence book review,
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.—Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Czech author, critic.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.—Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in
old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913), Canadian novelist,
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 (1874-1925), U.S. poet.
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
—Emily Dickinson (1830-86), U.S. poet.
The books we think we ought to read are poky,
dull, and dry;
The books that we would like to read we are
ashamed to buy;
The books that people talk about we never can
recall;
And the books that people give us, oh, they’re the
worst of all.
—Carolyn Wells (1870-1942), U.S. author. On Books