Books Quotes

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

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

Books may well be the only true magic.

Alice Hoffman

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson

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.

Francis Bacon

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

William E. Channing

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

Francis Bacon

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

Sir John Denham

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection, otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

Michel de Montaigne

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

Barbara Tuchman

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

Heinrich Heine

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

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

William Shakespeare

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - That work I abhor - Then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

Katherine Paterson

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

Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.

Christopher Dawson

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - They have preservatives.

Calvin Trillin

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

We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends.

Alfred A. Montapert

I cannot live without books.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Walter Bagehot

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

When the destroyer comes, his first act will be to destroy all the books.

Thomas More

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends - Always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.

Donald J. Adams

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

Oscar Levant

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.

Voltaire

An apology for the devil it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case God has written all the books.

Samuel Butle

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

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

Heinrich Heine

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

Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

Andrew Lang

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

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 particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

Edward Morgan Forste

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

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