Books Quotes and Sayings


Master books, but do not let them master you. - Read to live, not live to read.
Owen Meredith

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

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Woodrow Wilson

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James

When I can’t sleep, I read a book by Steve Allen.
Oscar Levant

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau

I love to lose myself in other men’s minds…. Books think for me.
Charles Lamb

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
Anonymous

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
Oscar Wilde

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
Andrew Ross

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Robert Gissing

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds… In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.
William Ellery Channing

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Elbert Hubbard

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
Henry David Thoreau

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
Caroline Gordon

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Elizabeth Drew

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Bertrand Russell

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.
William Ewart Gladstone

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.
John Greenleaf Whittier

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

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

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.
D. H. Lawrence

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Mark Twain

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