Books Quotes

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Ezra Loomis Pound

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

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

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.

Francis Bacon

Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

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

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

Walter Bagehot

Read much, but not many books.

Benjamin Franklin

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

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Samuel Butle

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

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people - A black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

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

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

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

When books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Heinrich Heine

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.

Franois Maurice Mitterrand

Associate with the noblest people you can find read the best books live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so do not wait for, or depend on other people.

Thomas Davidson

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

John Hope Franklin

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

Walter Bagehot

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 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

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Sir John Lubbock

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

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books.

Samuel Butler, The Note - Books of Samuel Butler (1912)

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 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

Christ is the Master the Scriptures are only the servant. The true way to test all the Books is to see whether they work the will of Christ or not. No Book which does not preach Christ can be apostolic, though Peter or Paul were its author. And no Book which does preach Christ can fail to be apostolic though Judas, Ananias, Pilate or Herod were its author.

Martin Luthe

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Anita Brookne

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

Dame Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train, 1926

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

Paul Valery

If you want to read about love and marriage, you have to buy two separate books.

Alan King

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.

Heinrich Heine