Books Quotes and Sayings

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.
Charles Dudley Warner

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross MacDonald

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

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.
Hamilton Wright Mabie

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Thomas Carlyle

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

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?
Ronnie Shakes

Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights.
Anonymous

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum — of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
Henry Miller

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
Oprah Winfrey

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
Charles Lamb

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

Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power.
Michael Foot

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.
Thomas Fuller

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
J. Swartz

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Katharine Mansfield

My brother-in-law wrote an unusal murder story. The victim got killed by a man from another book.
Robert Sylvester

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
Kenko Yoshida

I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.
Charles de Secondat

I’m trying to read a book on how to relax, but I keep falling asleep.
Jim Loy

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
Marina Tsvetaeva

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
Christopher Morley

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.
Mark Twain

He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays - cynical but hopeful.
Rose Macaulay

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
Bern Williams

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

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer Adler

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.
Anonymous