Books Quotes

Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

William Shakespeare

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books.

Thomas Carlyle

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

Paul Valery

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. ... It is time now to write the next chapter - And to write it in the books of law.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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 reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.

Rene Descartes

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. Dort, wo man B? cher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.

Heinrich Heine, From his play Almansor (1821)

Life is a library owned by an author. It has a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.

Evan Esa

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

James Baldwin

It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. ... that learning, books, education have glamour, that self - Improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.

Vartan Gregorian

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

John Burrough

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

Jim

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

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

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

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

Walter Bagehot

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Voltaire

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

Henry Ward Beeche

Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

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

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

Barbara Tuchman

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

Laurie Anderson

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

You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

Heinrich Heine

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

Jackie Collins

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Anita Brookne

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet

A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.

Franois Maurice Mitterrand

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

Umberto Eco

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Any man with a moderate income can afford to buy more books than he can read in a lifetime.

Henry Holt

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Katherine Mansfield

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Sir Francis Bacon