Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. – Judah Ibn Tibbon
The title of a book fills the place of the face in a human being. – Gustav Boehm, “A Discourse on Title Page Composition,” in The Inland Printer (Ch
The truest owner of a library is he who has bought each book for the love he bears to it; who is happy and content to say, “Here are my jewels, my choicest possessions!” – Frank Carr
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. – Francis Bacon
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. – Walter Pater
Sit bona librorum copia. – Horace (There are plenty of good books. Let me have a good supply of books.)
No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic. – Ann Landers
If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. – Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint…. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. – Henry David Thoreau
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. – Chinese Saying
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me. – Anatole France
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. – Jeremy Collier
Books are immortal sons deifying their sires. – Plato
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. – Mary Wortley Montagu
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution — such call I good books. – Henry David Thoreau
It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. – Sutton Elbert Griggs
Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this. – Rose Macaulay
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of race and a bond of union — great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind. – G.E. Woodberry
God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. – W.E. Channing
A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. – Holbrook Jackson
