Quotes on books
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Link to Quote
Franz Kafka Quotes
There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
Link to Quote
Joe Ryan Quotes
The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
Link to Quote
Howard Pyle Quotes
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Link to Quote
Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Chinese Saying Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
Books have to be read: worse luck it takes so long a time. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
Link to Quote
E.M. Forster Quotes
Americans like fat books and thin women.
Link to Quote
Russell Baker Quotes
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Link to Quote
Ross MacDonald Quotes
This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
Link to Quote
Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
Link to Quote
Kenko Yoshida Quotes
Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh.
Link to Quote
Judah Ibn Tibbon Quotes
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
Link to Quote
George Steiner Quotes
Lord! When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue. You sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
Link to Quote
Christopher Morley Quotes
There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Link to Quote
Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.
Link to Quote
Arabic Proverb Quotes
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Link to Quote
Augustine Birrell Quotes
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
Link to Quote
Gilbert Highet Quotes
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Link to Quote
Jessamyn West Quotes
Unto those Three Things which the Ancients held impossible, there should be added this Fourth, to find a Book Printed without erratas.
Link to Quote
Alfonso de Cartagena Quotes
A book that is shut is but a block.
Link to Quote
Thomas Fuller Quotes
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. Books think for me.
Link to Quote
Charles Lamb Quotes
The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Link to Quote
Earl of Chesterfield Quotes
There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.
Link to Quote
Jim Fiebig Quotes
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
Link to Quote
Anatole France Quotes
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.
Link to Quote
Washington Irving Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Charles Kingsley Quotes
For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.
Link to Quote
Francis Bacon Quotes
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
Link to Quote
John LeCarre Quotes
A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
Link to Quote
William Styron Quotes
I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
Link to Quote
Groucho Marx Quotes
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Link to Quote
Chinese Proverb Quotes
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Link to Quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
Link to Quote
E.M. Forster Quotes
In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.
Link to Quote
Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Link to Quote
Charles de Secondat Quotes
I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.
Link to Quote
Francesco Petrarch Quotes
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
Link to Quote
William James Quotes
A blessed companion is a book, - a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend, - a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.
Link to Quote
Douglas Jerrold Quotes
A dirty book is rarely dusty.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Jesse Lee Bennett Quotes
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.
Link to Quote
G.E. Woodberry Quotes
Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.
Link to Quote
Rose Macaulay Quotes
A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.
Link to Quote
Charles B. Fairbanks Quotes
A house without books is like a room without windows.
Link to Quote
Heinrich Mann Quotes
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
Link to Quote
George Robert Gissing Quotes
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Link to Quote
Henry Miller Quotes
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
Link to Quote
Marina Tsvetaeva Quotes
Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.
Link to Quote
Forsyth and Rada Quotes
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Link to Quote
Mary Wortley Montagu Quotes
Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.
Link to Quote
Charles Dudley Warner Quotes
Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by.
Link to Quote
Bulstrode Whitlock Quotes
From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.
Link to Quote
S.M. Crothers Quotes
A good book has no ending.
Link to Quote
R.D. Cumming Quotes
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
Link to Quote
Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
Link to Quote
William Styron Quotes
How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead! What a heritage of stored wealth! What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it!
Link to Quote
J.N. Larned Quotes
To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.
Link to Quote
John Aikin Quotes
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
Link to Quote
Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Link to Quote
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes
God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
Link to Quote
W.E. Channing Quotes
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Link to Quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.
Link to Quote
William Ewart Gladstone Quotes
A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.
Link to Quote
Holbrook Jackson Quotes
I like intellectual reading. It's to my mind what fiber is to my body.
Link to Quote
Grey Livingston Quotes
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Link to Quote
Groucho Marx Quotes
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
Link to Quote
John Ruskin Quotes
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Link to Quote
Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Paul Sweeney Quotes
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
Link to Quote
E.P. Whipple Quotes
I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Link to Quote
Woodrow Wilson Quotes