To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.
John Aikin
Reading means borrowing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Books are made not like children but like pyramids…and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert!…Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.
Gustave Flaubert
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
James Bryce
Only your friends steal your books.
Voltaire
Books, I don’t know what you see in them…I can understand a person reading them, but I can’t for the life of me see why people have to write them.
Peter Ustinov
A dirty book is rarely dusty.
Anonymous
A book is the only immortality.
Rufus Choate
Few books today are forgivable.
R. D. Laing
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot.
Arabic Proverb
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
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
If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The books that help you most are those which make you think the 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 Parker
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
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
Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
Francis Bacon
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese Proverb
It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?
J. M. Barrie
My Book and Heart Must never part.
Anonymous
Lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.
Thomas Jefferson
I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx
Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
George Steiner
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell
Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.
George Crabbe
Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.
William Feather
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
Paul Sweeney
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
Clifton Fadiman
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it!
John Ruskin
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.
Chinese Proverb
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Rebecca West
My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.
Thomas Helm
For books are more than books, they are the life The very heart and core of ages past, The reason why men lived and worked and died, The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell
For friends… do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.
Francis Bacon
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P.J. O’Rourke
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
William Hazlitt
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin Yutang
He that loveth a book will never want for a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.
Isaac Barrow
There is no frigate like a book, To take us lands away.
Emily Dickinson
In the middle of the silence in a writer’s house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.
Richard Eder
I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands.
Seneca
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Albert Camus
Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books.
Earl of Chesterfield
All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy Lowell
Books are embalmed minds.
Bovee
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.
George Bernard Shaw
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Elizabeth Hardwick
A library is thought in cold storage.
Herbert Samuel
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”
Helen Exley
I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.
Ann Richards
Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman
A book is to me like a hat or coat – a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.
Charles B. Fairbanks
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Franz Kafka