Books Quotes

You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things the people with whom you associate and the books you read.

Charles Jones

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Horace

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Arthuer Schopenhaue

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - But it is terrible when one has to live it.

Jean Anouilh

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore.

Henry Ward Beeche

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

Helen Hayes

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person weighs more than them all.

Elie Wiesel, O Magazine, November 2000

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

Michel de Montaigne

America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land.

President Ronald Reagan, to the National Association of Evangelicals, Columbus, Ohio

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

Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin

Books may well be the only true magic.

Alice Hoffman

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

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

Barbara Tuchman

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

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

Jim

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

I still find each day to 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

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 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

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Walter Bagehot

Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

Emerson

It becomes a bore doing imaginative books that do not touch imaginations, and at length one stops even planning them.

H. G. Wells, Preface of "The Complete Science - Fiction Treasury of H. G. Wells".

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

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

Henry C. Rogers

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

Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.

Romare Beardon

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

Voltaire

The experience to be gathered from books, Though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning Whereas the experience gained from actual life, Is of the nature of wisdom And a small store of the latter Is worth vastly more than a stock of the former.

Samuel Smiles

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

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