Quotes about Books

Hence much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature, and deprives their writings of all success; they are, as Pope says— 'For ever reading, never to be read'.

Librarians hoard the wisdom of humanity. They are the keepers of all knowledge, the guardians at the temples of understanding and devoted protectors of the sanctuary in the midst of uneducated anarchy.

Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.

The estrangement between Edwards and his people began in 1744, in connection with a case of discipline in which a large number of the youth belonging to the leading families of the town were brought under suspicion of reading and circulating immoral books.

In the years 1889 and 1890, at the Ratsschul Library in Zwickau, about seventy-five miles east of Erfurt, someone came upon what turned out to be early fifteenth-century volumes that Luther had held and studied as a young monk. It was a spectacular find. Several of these books were works by Augustine. The marginal notes and other writing were confirmed as Luther's own handwriting, so suddenly historians could know what he had underlined as he was reading.

As Eisenstein affirmed, the impact of books to alter the master-apprentice traditional relationship was quite clear, as people could "instruct themselves primarily from books with a minimum of outside help" and "cut the bonds of subordination which kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.

I hate to lend a book I love…it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me…

Our library isn't very extensive, said Anne, but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.