Quotations about books:

Sourced

• One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.
  • Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, (1940; 1972)

• Why is marking a book indespensible to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in wordes, spoken or written...Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author...Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author, It is the highest respect you can pay him.
  • Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, (1940; 1972)

• Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
  • Francis Bacon "Of Studies"

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

• The covers of this book are too far apart.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

• Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
  • Harold Bloom, quoted in O Magazine (April 2003)

• Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
  • Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), translated by William Weaver (1981), p. 72

• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
  • G. K. Chesterton, in Heretics (1905)

• There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906)

• Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
  • Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon (1820)

• Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us a model of how we should always read.
  • Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking (1928)

• And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
  • Ecclesiastes 12:12, King James Version

• Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
  • Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa [The Name of the Rose] (1980), said by character William of Baskerville, originally in Italian.

• There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
  • Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa [The Name of the Rose] (1980)

• In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality (1876)

• 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 in The Happy Life (1896)

• Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
  • Alfred Whitney Griswold, in Essays on Education as quoted in The New York Times (24 February 1959)

• Truly, associating with bad books is often more dangerous than associating with bad people.
  • Original German: "Wahrhaftig, der Umgang mit schlechten Büchern ist oft gefährlicher als mit schlechten Menschen."
  • Wilhelm Hauff, Das Buch und die Leserwelt

• Where one begins by burning books, one will end up burning people.
  • Original German: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
  • Heinrich Heine in Almansor

• Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
  • Bell Hooks, quoted in O Magazine (December 2003)

• Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book, Mein Kampf!
  • Friedrich Kellner, quoted in Mainz Allgemeine Zeitung (September 24, 2005)

• Any of us might live a long life or pass away tomorrow. I have come to believe that living your well-read life is measured not by the number of books read at the end of your life but by whether you are in book love today, tomorrow, and next week.
  • Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005), p. 7

• A single book at the right time can change our views dramatically, give a quantum boost to our knowledge, help us construct a whole new outlook on the world and our life. Isn't it odd that we don't seek those experiences more systematically?
  • Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005), p. 11

• The first step to retention is to briefly review your book almost immediately after finishing it. It's easier if you've marked passages and taken notes in the margins and on the endpapers. You can then go back through your book, reminding yourself why you marked the particular passages and wrote the commentary you did. This may encourage you to add to your marginalia or write longer notes elsewhere.
  • Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005), p. 39

• You will be surprised what psychological motivation there is in your having physical possession of the books you plan to read.
  • Norman Lewis, How to Read Better and Faster

• When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is that always in the book?
  • Original German: "Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buche?"
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Vermischte Schriften, E (1775 - 1776), 103

• A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Vermischte Schriften, K (1789-1793), 351
  • Original German: "Ein sicheres Zeichen von einem guten Buche ist, wenn es einem immer besser gefällt, je älter man wird."

• The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus (1875)

• When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, in Of Human Bondage (1915)

• A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
  • Edward P. Morgan, in Clearing the Air (1963), p. 4

• Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
  • Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living (1931)

• Affect not as some do that bookish ambition to be stored with books and have well-furnished libraries, yet keep their heads empty of knowledge; to desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping.
  • Henry Peacham, in The Compleat Gentleman (1622)

• You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring it nothing but your eye.
  • Walter Pitkin, Art of Rapid Reading (1930)

• Literature is news that stays news.
  • Ezra Pound, in ABC of Reading (1934), Ch. 8

• Even big collections of ordinary books distort space and time, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full sized human to enter. The relevant equation is Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. Mass distorts space into polyfractal L-space, in which Everywhere is also Everywhere Else. All libraries are connected in L-space by the bookwormholes created by the strong space-time distortions found in any large collection of books. Only a very few librarians learn the secret, and there are inflexible rules about making use of the fact — because it amounts to time travel. The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: (1) Silence; (2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown, and (3) the nature of causality must not be interfered with.
  • Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs in The Discworld Companion (1997)

• Books are for use.
  • Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, Five Laws of Library Science (1928)

• Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.
  • Anne Rice, The Witching Hour (1990), p. 261

• No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
  • Romain Rolland, in Journey Within (1947)

• Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
  • Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at The Bellona Club (1928)

• Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 sc. 2

• People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
  • Logan Pearsall Smith, "Myself", Afterthoughts (1931)

• When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.
  • Marie de Sevigne, O Magazine (December 2003)

• How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
  • Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden: Reading, 1854

• A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)

• No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading now, or surrender yourself to self-ignorance.
  • "On Reading", Good Reading: A Helpful Guide for Serious Readers, created by a group chaired by Atwood H. Townsend, NYU professor

• Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
  • Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995)

• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Preface

See also

• Librarianship

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