Books Quotes

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

William Shakespeare

Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.

Lord Chesterfield

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

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

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

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

Umberto Eco

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson

We must get beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths... and tell the world the glories of our journey.

John Hope Franklin

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

Liesure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain

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

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

Saint Bernard, Epistle

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books.

Thomas Carlyle

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.

Sir Francis Bacon

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

Heinrich Heine

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore.

Henry Ward Beeche

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Joseph Addison

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.

Paxton Hood

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

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Walter Bagehot

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays - Cynical, but hopeful.

Dame Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train, 1926

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

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

Andrew Lang

The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.

William Lyon Phelps

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.

Paxton Hood

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Mark Twain

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

I still find each day too 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

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

Charles W. Eliot, The Happy Life, 1896

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

Hermann Hesse

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

Karl Kraus

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

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

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

Jim