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Quotations about Libraries, Books, and Reading

I cannot live without books.
        Thomas Jefferson

Books are Y2K compliant
         Unknown

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
         James McCosh

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it is hard to read.
                 Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
                 Groucho Marx

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
         Chinese Proverb

Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
         Cicero

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
         Mortimer J. Adler

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
         John Milton

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
                  Paxton Hood

Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
             Dwight D. Eisenhower

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.
             Charles Kingsley

To acquire the habit of reading
is to construct for yourself a refuge
            from almost all of the miseries of life.
                 W. Somerset Maugham

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
         John Witherspoon

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.
         Martin Tupper

What's a book?
Everything or nothing.
            The eye that sees it all.
                Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever they burn books they will also,
in the end, burn human beings.
                 Heinrich Heine

A good word is like a good tree whose root is firmly
fixed and whose top is in the sky.
                 The Koran

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends:
they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors,
            and the most patient of teachers.
                  Charles W. Eliot

A library is a hospital for the mind.
         Anonymous

I had just taken to reading.  I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company  and new scenes...  My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.
         H. G. Wells

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
            Henry Ward Beecher

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
         Richard Steele

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
             Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
             William Phelps

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.  I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.  As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
         Malcolm X

If we encounter a man of rare intellect,
we should ask him what books he reads.
                Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
                 S. I. Hayakawa

It is no more necessary that a man should remember
the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy,
            than the different books which have made him wise.
            Let us see the results of good food in a strong body,
            and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
                 Sydney Smith

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point.  The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
                  Edward Gibbon

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
             Walt Disney

The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
            The more that you learn,
            the more places you'll go.
                 Dr. Seuss

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
            Nor any Coursers like a Page
            Of prancing Poetry...
                  Emily Dickinson

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day,
   if it is but a single sentence.
            If you gain fifteen minutes a day, 
               it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
                    Horace Mann

Readers may be divided into four classes:
1.) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in
                 nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
             2.) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and
                 are content to get through a book
                 for the sake of getting through the time.
             3.) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
             4.) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable,
                 who profit by what they read,
                 and enable others to profit by it also.
                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
             Thomas Carlyle

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.
            Marie de Sevigne

The way a book is read-
which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book-
            can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
                  Norman Cousins

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia.  When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.
        Kirk Douglas

T'is the good reader that makes the good book.
        Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left
I buy food and clothes.
                  Erasmus

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
           W. Somerset Maugham

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
        Edmund Burke

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
           B. F. Skinner

The end of reading is not more books but more life.
        Holbrook Jackson

Fiction is like a spider's web,
   attached ever so lightly perhaps,
               but still attached to life at all four corners.
                     Virginia Woolf

Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.
            Socrates

Literature is my Utopia.
        Helen Keller

Reading maketh a full man.
        Francis Bacon

My library was dukedom large enough.
       William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.
                  Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I... discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
            Jean Fritz

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.
        Rita Mae Brown

The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials... You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach.  All you need is the willingness to read.
       Harry Golden

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.
            Francis Bacon

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
        Jorge Luis Borges

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
        John Naisbitt

A library should be like a pair of open arms.
        Roger Rosenblatt

[The library] is like a place of sacredness. If we were fools at onetime, perhaps we will not be fools tomorrow, if we study.
                   Chief Tom Porter

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
           Marston Bates

T'is true: there's magic in the web of it...
        William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3, Scene 4

More people should use their library.
       Regis Philbin

What can I say? Librarians rule.
        Regis Philbin

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.
                 Stephen Jay Gould

Doing research on the Web is like using a library
assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
                 Roger Ebert

Words are the voice of the heart.
       Confucius

We read to know we are not alone.
        C.S. Lewis

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
        Bern Williams

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.
               Theodore Parker

The libraries have become my candy store.
        Juliana Kimball

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
                Daniel J. Boorstein

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.
               Longfellow

I've traveled the world twice over,
    Met the famous; saints and sinners,
                Poets and artists, kings and queens,
               Old stars and hopeful beginners,
               I've been where no-one's been before,
               Learned secrets from writers and cooks
               All with one library ticket
               To the wonderful world of books.
                     Unknown

Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.
        Alvin Toffler

None is poor save him that lacks knowledge.
       The Talmud

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
            Benjamin Franklin

Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.
        Chinese Proverb

"Librarians are not just good at internet searching because we understand how to play word games.  We're good because we know where we need to go and the quickest routes for getting there; we are equipped not just with compasses but with mental maps of the information landscape.
        Marylaine Block

"I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am...
            I, am a librarian!"!
                    From the movie, The Mummy

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

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.
            Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education

Students who score higher on "tests tend to come from schools which have more library resource staff and more books, periodicals and videos, and where the instructional role of the teacher-librarian and involvement in cooperative program planning and teaching is more prominent."
       Keith Curry Lance, et. al.
       The Impact of School Library Media Centers on Academic Achievement.

The quotations are the intellectual property of the cited individuals.