151 Books Quotes to share with friends and relatives

For friends… do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. – Francis Bacon

A book that is shut is but a block. – Thomas Fuller

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. – Thomas Carlyle

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived. – Howard Pyle

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Medicine for the soul. – Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. – E.P. Whipple

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. – Joseph Brodsky

Books are embalmed minds. – Bovee

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget. – William Lyon Phelps

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs. – Henry Ward Beecher

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. – Charles Dudley Warner

If you have never said “Excuse me” to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time. – Sherri Chasin Calvo

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. – Ross MacDonald

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. – Samuel Butler

There are many persons pretending to have a refined literary taste, who seldom read any books but those which are fashionable… – Charles Lanman, “Thoughts on Literature,” 1840

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command. – Francesco Petrarch

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

Catalogues of imaginary libraries are an obscure but fruitful area of collecting. The tradition of imaginary books, which exist only within other books, goes back at least to Rabelais, who invented a list of book titles for the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Gargantua and Pantagruel (c.1532). – Emi Hastings, “Catalogues of Imaginary Libraries,” 2014

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. – Edmund Burke