151 Books Quotes to share with friends and relatives

Books — the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. – George Steiner

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a book is never just a book. – The Old Sage Bookshop in Prescott, Arizona

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. – W. Somerset Maugham

How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead! What a heritage of stored wealth! What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it! – J.N. Larned

Books are a uniquely portable magic. – Stephen King

He retired to his bibliomaniacal bed… – Thomas Frognall Dibdin, “The Drawing Room,”Bibliomania; or, Book Madness: A Bibl

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. – Amos Bronson Alcott

The multitude of books is making us ignorant. – Voltaire

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written. – Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. – Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710

No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography. – Burton E. Stevenson, A Guide to Biography for Young Readers: American — Me

Encourage and pursue an inclination to reading early in life; it is laying up a treasure for the latter part of it… – Countess Dowager of Carlisle, Thoughts in the Form of Maxims addressed to Young

What the candystore was to other kids, the bookstore was to me. The library was my vacation. – Terri Guillemets, “Young bookworm,” 1998

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

Nothing is more beautiful than a beautiful book. – Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), translated from French by George H. Calvert, 1

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. – Henry Ward Beecher

The alluring influences of bibliophilism, or book-loving, have silently crept into thousands of homes, whether beautiful or humble; for the library is properly regarded as one of the most important features of home as well as mental equipment. – Henry H. Harper, Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs, 1904

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. – E.M. Forster

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books. – Karl Lagerfeld