Quotes & Quotations

Quotes & Quotations

About Libraries, Librarians, Books and Reading

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!
&Richard Brainsley Sheridan 

A democratic society depends upon an informed and educated citizenry
&Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 

A great library contains the diary of the human race. 

&George Mercer Dawson 

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.... Children learn to read being in the presence of books
&Horace Mann (1796-1859) 

A library is a hospital for the mind.
&Anonymous 

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
&Henry Ward Beecher 

A library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it.
&Richard de Bury 

A room without a book is like a body without a soul
&Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) 

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. 

&Jo Godwin 

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. 

&Shelby Foote 

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 

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

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
&Benjamin Disraeli 

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
&Edwin P. Whipple 

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 

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. 

&Henry David Thoreau 

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. 
&Ralph Waldo Emerson (Books, Society and Solitude) 

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.
&Dwight D. Eisenhower 

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

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

Here is where people, One frequently finds, Lower their voices. And raise their minds.
&Richard Armour 

I cannot live without books.
&Thomas Jefferson 

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

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way.
&Franklin P. Adams 

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 

I have written 240 books on a wide variety of topics. . . . Some of it I based on education I received in my school, but most of it was backed by other ways of learning -- chiefly in the books I obtained in the public library. 

&Isaac Asimov 

I read because one life isn't enough.
&Richard Peck 

If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.
&Thomas Hobbes 

If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures.
&Harry A. Overstreet 

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

If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairly tales. If you want them to be geniuses, read them more fairy tales. 

&Albert Einstein 

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 

Indiscriminate reading is unprofitable to the mind.
&Latin Proverb 

Information is the currency of democracy. 

&Thomas Jefferson 

It is impossible to enter a large library... without feeling an inward sensation of reverence, and without catching some sparks of noble emulation, from the mass of mind which is scattered around you.
&James Crossley 

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.
&Unknown 

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
&Samuel Johnson 

Knowledge is Power 

&Francois Bacon 

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 

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable.  Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed. 

&Charles Medawar 

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 

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. 

&Germaine Greer 

Libraries enable the past to talk to the future.
&Edward Cornish 

Libraries:  The medicine chest of the soul. 

&Library at Thebes, inscription over the door 

My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve. 

&Joseph Howe 

My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.
&Robert Downs 

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 

New Laws of Librarianship: Libraries serve humanity 

Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated 

Use technology intelligently to enhance service 

Protect free access to knowledge 

Honor the past & create the future 

&Michael Gorman 

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library 

&Samuel Johnson 

No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books.  Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy. 

&John Alfred Landford 

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
&Barbara Tuchman 

Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul) 

&Berlin Royal Library, inscription 

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. 

&Frederick Douglass 

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
&Lady Bird Johnson 

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

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own. 

&Charles Scribner, Jr. 

Reading is a window to the world!
&Lynn Butler 

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

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

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 Centre on Academic Achievement) 

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. 

&Lesley Conger 

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

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker-- it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
&Theodore Parker 

The closest thing you will find to an orderly universe is a good library.
&Ashleigh Brilliant 

The dissemination of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of civilization.
&John F. Budd 

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
&Jacques Ellul 

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries
&Carl Sagan Cosmos 

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 

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books.  It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual.  A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. 

&Norman Cousins 

The library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas. 

&Norman Cousins 

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 

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
&Mark Twain 

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.
&Augustine Birrell 

The medicine chest of the soul. 

&Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes 

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

The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can carry beyond the grave is wisdom.
& J. A. Langford 

The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. 

&Malcolm Forbes 

The true university these days is a collection of books.
&Thomas Carlyle 

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.
&Ross MacDonald 

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 new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the heart of men centuries dead.
&Clarence Day 

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

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration
&Andrew Carnegie 

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

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

To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.
&Cicero 

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
&Claude Adrien Helvetius 

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

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

We cannot have good libraries until we first have good librarians -- properly educated, professionally recognized, and fairly rewarded.
&Herbert S. White 

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. 

&John Lubbock 

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

What can I say? Librarians rule.
&Regis Philbin 

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

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

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

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