No representation is made as to the accuracy of the following quotes except that they are more or less the same as when we took them without permission from a variety of uncredited sources.
"A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
"The best heads the world ever knew were well read and the best heads take the best places." Emerson
"Let not the collector ... unless in some urgent and necessary circumstances, part with any of his treasures. " Sir Richard Burton.
"A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life." Haines, T. L. & Yaggy, L. W. "The Royal Path of Life"
"The paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace the hardcover book-- it makes a very poor doorstop." Alfred Hitchcock
"A book shop is a place where people can go to talk to other people who understand what they're talking about." Amalya Reifsneider
"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." Peter De Vries
"Outside of a dog a book is man's best friend; inside of a dog it is too dark to read." Groucho Marx
"When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness." Vincent Starrett
Book catalog listing:
Bellow, Saul : The Dean's December ; NY: Harper,1982 . BCE. VG copy in vg dj. Inscription to previous owner on fep: "Merry Christmas Mom--You're sure to like it -- I didn't". US$8.00
"Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."
Borges, "The Theologians"
"My books are water: those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water." Samuel Clemens
"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessable, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Books
"The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer are: 1. Never read any book that is not a year old; 2. Never read any but the famed books; 3. Never read any but what you like." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Books
"'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 unmistakably 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." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Success
"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." Chinese proverb
"Laws die. Books never." Bulwer-Lytton - "Richelieu -or The Conspiracy."
"All that mankind has done, thought or gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men." Carlyle - Heroes and Hero Worship
"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." Channing
"A book is the only immortality." Rufus Choate
"Beware the man of one book." Issac D'Israeli - Curiosities of Literature
"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Ecclesiastes. XII.12
"If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely." Arthur Helps
"My desire is....that mine adversary had written a book. Job. XXXI.35
"Everywhere I have sought rest and found it not except sitting apart in a nook with a little book." Thomas A` Kempis
"Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from.... human souls we never saw...And these arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers." Kingsley
"The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander." Landor
"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Milton - Areopagitica
"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking." Jerry Seinfeld
"As good almost kill a man as kill a book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye." Milton - Areopagitica
"A bestseller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent." Logan P. Smith - Afterthoughts
"The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges." Nancy Byrd Turner - The Bookshop
"All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books." Voltaire
"Camerado, this is no book.
Who touches this, touches a man." Whitman - So Long
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The pen is the tongue of the mind." Cervantes - Don Quixote
"The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children." Disraeli
"I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it." Woodrow Wilson
"[Books] muss up my mind." Henry Ford
"He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite." Bulwer-Lytton
"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." Mohammed - Tribute to Reason
"The foolisest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow." Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Ladies and Gentlemen, these are books! They keep quiet. They do not suddenly dissolve into wavy lines or snowstorm effects. They do not pause to deliver a message from their sponsers. And every one of them is three-dimensional: they have length, breadth, and thickness for convenience in handling, and they live indefinitely in the fourth dimension of time." George Stevens, Advertisement, Saturday Review, 1953
"Don't join the book burners. Don't ever think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of democracy. That should be the only censorship." Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarks, Dartmouth College Commencement, June 14th, 1953.
"To destroy the Western tradition of independent thought it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is leave them unread for a couple of generations." Robert M. Hutchins, The Conflict In Education
"We all know that books burn - yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. In this war, we know, books are weapons." Franklin D. Roosevelt, message to the American Booksellers Association, April 23, 1942
"A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to anykind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened." John Steinbeck
"Do you need a liberal education? I say it's unpatriotic not to read great books...The democratic enterprise is emperiled if any one of us says, 'I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of the world republic of learning.' The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." Robert M. Hutchins, Great Books, 1954
"This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing-gum." Elbert Hubbard, The Philistine
"There is a great library of books; every man of reasonable intelligence will look into it, to see what it contains that may be of value to him. And its value is not anywhere near as has been intimated; probably seven-tenths of it is rubbish, although much rubbish is curious and interesting." Edgar W. Howe, Ventures In Common Sense, 1919
"All books become light in proportion as you find light in them." Mortimer J. Adler, preface, How To Read A Book
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Events, not books, should be forbid." Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, 1852
"A house without books is like a room without windows." Horace Mann
"The best teacher is not life, but the crystallized and distilled experience of the most sensitive, reflective and most observant of our human beings, and this experience you will find preserved in our great books and nowhere else." Nathan Pusey
"The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar." Oliver Wendell Holmes, letter to C. C. Wu, 1925
"A dishonest critic, by severing passages from their context, may make the best book appear to condemn itself. A book, thus unfairly treated, may be compared to the laurel - there is honor in the leaves but poison in the extract." George D. Prentice, Louisville Journal
"Few books and plenty of real things." John Burroughs, Indoor Studies
"Those who, for example, have never seen an author are likely to take books with the wrong kind of seriousness." Joseph Wood Krutch, The Best Of Both Worlds
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongss to you: the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people, then you are a writer." Ernest Hemingway, "Old Newsman Writes," Esquire, Dec. 1934
"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at 18 and at 48." Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading, 1934
"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall. Nations perish. Civilizations grow old and die out. And after an era of darkness new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yetlive 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
"I've given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself." Oscar Levant
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." Henry David Thoreau
"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Henry David Thoreau, Journal 1853 (In 1849 Thoreau paid to have 1000 copies of his first book A Week On The Concord And Merrimack printed. Four years later 706 copies were returned unsold.)
"Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?" Albert Einstein
"This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two. " George Burns
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