No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead. – Van Wyck Brooks

Books are embalmed minds. – Bovee

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. – Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. – Oliver Wendell Holmes