quotations about books
For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
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"Parliament of Foules"
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 yet unborn.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Sep. 10, 1711
It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first we are highly delighted, if we find a general agreement--if we are pleasantly moved on any of the chief sides of our existence. With a closer acquaintance differences come to light; and then reasonable conduct mainly consists in not shrinking back at once, as may happen in youth, but in keeping firm hold of the things in which we agree, and being quite clear about the things in which we differ, without on that account desiring any union.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
GRAHAM GREENE
Travels with My Aunt
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, Nov. 23, 2003
We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books...They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables...I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
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
"The Boston Athenæum", A Dome of Many-coloured Glass
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
ROALD DAHL
The Telegraph, Sep. 13, 2011
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,", Other Inquisitions
McDonald’s has announced that for the next month in the United Kingdom, Happy Meals will come with a book instead of a toy. And they will be renamed "Disappointment Meals."
JIMMY KIMMEL
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jan. 12, 2012
If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
R. D. LAING
introduction, The Politics of Experience
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them ... with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind. Whether it be, that these instruments of truth and knowledge will not bear being subjected to anything but those noble ends, without revenging themselves on those who meddle with to any other purpose, and prostitute them to mean and misbecoming designs; I will not inquire. The matter of fact, I think you will find true; and there will leave it to those who sully themselves with printer's ink, till they wholly expunge all the candour that nature gives, and become the worst sort of black cattle.
JOHN LOCKE
letter to Anthony Collins, June 9, 1704