Books Quotes

Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

Emerson

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

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. ... It is time now to write the next chapter - And to write it in the books of law.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - That work I abhor - Then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

Katherine Paterson

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

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

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

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Hermann Hesse

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

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

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

Heinrich Heine

Who knows why we live, and struggle, and die... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Alan Stewart Paton

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

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends.

Alfred A. Montapert

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

Mortimer Adle

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 own particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

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

Mark Twain

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Shakespeare

The books that help you most are those which make you think that 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 Parke

When the destroyer comes, his first act will be to destroy all the books.

Thomas More

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.

Arthur Schopenhaue

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

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Oscar Wilde

I mean your borrowers of books - Those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Charles Lam

No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

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

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

Laurie Anderson

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet

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

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