Quotes

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page & feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

~ Paul Sweeney

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

~ Anthony Trollope

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

~ Mark Twain

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

~ Albert Einstein

I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

~ Groucho Marx

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

~ Oscar Wilde

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

~ Dr. Seuss (I Can Read with My Eyes Shut)

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

~ C.S. Lewis

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

~ Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

~ Mark Twain

When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

~ Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

~ J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

~ Charles W. Eliot

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

~ Sir Francis Bacon

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

~ Gustave Flaubert

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

~ William Styron

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.

~ Groucho Marx

Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.

~ Charlaine Harris

A house without books is like a room without windows.

~ Horace Mann

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

~ Robert Frost

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

~ Voltaire

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

~ Dr. Seuss

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

~ Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.

~ Stephen King

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

~ Roald Dahl

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

~ Abraham Lincoln

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

~ Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid)

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

~ Walt Disney Company

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

~ Stephen King

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

~ Joseph Joubert

All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.

~ Lemony Snicket

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

~ Christopher Paolini (Eragon)

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.

~ Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

~ Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

~ Alan Bennett (The History Boys: The Film)

If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!

~ John Waters

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

~ C.S. Lewis

If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper–memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.

~ Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.

~ Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

~ Malcolm X

Books may well be the only true magic.

~ Alice Hoffman

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

~ C.S. Lewis

Good books are as friends, willing to give to us if we are willing to make a little effort.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

~ Oscar Wilde

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

~ Edmund Burke

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

The aim of an author should be to get their readers to miss their bus stops.

~ Rod Duncan

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

~ G.K. Chesterton

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

~ Confucius

A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend.

~ Author Unknown

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

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

~ James Bryce

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.

~ Author Unknown

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

~ William Hazlitt

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.

~ Andrew Ross

I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

~ Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.

~ Kenko Yoshida

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

~ Bern Williams

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

~ James Russell Lowell

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

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

~ E.P. Whipple

Books are embalmed minds.

~ Bovee

If you have never said “Excuse me” to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.

~ Sherri Chasin Calvo

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

~ Ross MacDonald

Never judge a book by its movie.

~ J.W. Eagan

The mere brute pleasure of reading – the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

~ Lord Chesterfield

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

~ Amos Bronson Alcott

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

~ Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710

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 Saying

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

~ Mary Wortley Montagu

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

~ Holbrook Jackson

A blessed companion is a book, – a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend, … a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.

~ Douglas Jerrold

Reading – the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

~ William Styron

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary.  It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

~ Holbrook Jackson