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

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

Through all of my youth these books were my companions, and now, as I write these lines, after sixty years, they still look down upon me with their old friendliness. – James L. Whitney, “Reminiscences of an Old Librarian,” November 1909