Books Quotes

Never lend books - Nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

Anatole France

Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.

Peter S. Prescott

I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person weighs more than them all.

Elie Wiesel, O Magazine, November 2000

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Arthuer Schopenhaue

Any ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

Augustine Birrell

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.

Heinrich Heine

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

Henry C. Rogers

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Sir Francis Bacon

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

G. K. Chesterton

I wonder how so insupportable a thing as a bookseller was ever permitted to grow up in the Commonwealth. Many of our modern booksellers are but needless excrements, or rather vermin.

George Withe

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

Henry Ward Beeche

Nothing, it appears to me is of greater value in a man than the power of judgement and the man who has it may be compared to a chest fulled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.

Pietro Aretino

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

Karl Kraus

It becomes a bore doing imaginative books that do not touch imaginations, and at length one stops even planning them.

H. G. Wells, Preface of "The Complete Science - Fiction Treasury of H. G. Wells".

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

Miguel de Cervantes

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Remember the Dick - And - Jane books and the first word you learned - - The biggest word of all - - Look.

Robert Fulghum

Books have the same enemies as people fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. Auden

If you want to read about love and marriage, you have to buy two separate books.

Alan King

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend rather than the gloss of a sweet lipped flatterer; there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness.

Francis Quarles

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Mark Twain

To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

Sir William Osle

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

Theodore Parke

Learning is acquired by reading books but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them.

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

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

Francis Bacon

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

Sir W. Temple

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Paxton Hood

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Jackie Collins

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson

Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy