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Libraries

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. – Lemony Snicket

Every man should have a library. The works of the grandest masters of literature may now be procured at prices that place them within the reach almost of the very poorest, and we may all put Parnassian singing birds into our chambers to cheer us with the sweetness of their songs. – William E.A. Axon, October 1867

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. – Jo Godwin

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. – Samuel Johnson

No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy. – John Alfred Landford

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. – Quoted in The Whole Earth Catalog, 1980 edition, originally created by Stewart B

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed. – Charles Medawar

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them. – Mark Twain, 1894

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. – Shelby Foote

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. – Germaine Greer

Librarians are generals in the war on ignorance. – Author Unknown

There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out. – Tom Masson

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind. – Richard Powers

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A word also as to the cost of carriage: This is at present so high, whether the means be mail or express, that we may properly set it down as the chief obstacle to the free development of inter-library loans. – William Warner Bishop, “Inter-Library Loans,” 1909

Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul). – Berlin Royal Library, inscription

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that. – J. Donald Adams

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin. – Hugo Ball

I myself spent hours at the Columbia library as intimidated and embarassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the worlds cuisines, past and present, was available on request. – Luigi Barzini

A library is but the souls burying ground. It is a land of shadows. – Henry Ward Beecher