quotations about books
The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
Are not good books honey-comb from the bee-hives of industry, handed down to us to sweeten our lives and help us aim to higher attainments of happiness? Are not good books white-winged messengers of love and good cheer, coming out of the past to cheer and strengthen us for the duties and responsibilities of life? Are not good books the golden settings of gems of truth and diamonds of knowledge prepared for our diadems of rejoicing and crowns of victory? Are not good books so many angel gifts sent to sweeten the bitterness of human life?
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
JONATHAN RABAN
For Love and Money
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Norwegian Wood
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
ANNE RICE
Blackwood Farm
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, Nov. 23, 2003
It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first we are highly delighted, if we find a general agreement--if we are pleasantly moved on any of the chief sides of our existence. With a closer acquaintance differences come to light; and then reasonable conduct mainly consists in not shrinking back at once, as may happen in youth, but in keeping firm hold of the things in which we agree, and being quite clear about the things in which we differ, without on that account desiring any union.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The Book: Man's Chief Weapon Against Tedium.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"How I Spent My Winter Vacation,", Salon, Jan. 5, 2010
The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," , On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
letter to Charles Sumner, September 17, 1842
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
GEORGE ORWELL
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk