Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

- Charles Caleb Colson

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

- Walt Whitman

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

- Thomas Jefferson

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

- Lillian Hellman

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

- Heinrich Heine

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!

- Henry Ward Beecher

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

- Mortimer Adler

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

- William Osler

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

- Heinrich Heine

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

- Arnold Lobel

Only one hour in a day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

- Rose Macaulay

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

- bell hooks

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.

- Mortimer Adler

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

- Aldous Huxley

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

- John Ruskin



A book worth reading is worth buying.

- John Ruskin



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

- Georg C. Lichtenberg



And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

- T. S. Eliot



Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were our demigods.

- Nick Bantock



After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

- Albert Camus



I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

- Denise Levertov



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



Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed on and digested.

- Francis Bacon



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

- Bertrand Russell



Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov



The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

- Oscar Wilde



Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart.

- WIlliam Ellery Channing



A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

- Margaret Fuller



A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas -- a place where history comes to life.

- Norman Cousins



Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satelite instead of a system.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

- Theodore Parker



Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

- Harriet Martineau



People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

- Abraham Lincoln



Do give books -- religious or otherwise -- for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.

- Lenore Hershey



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

- Elizabeth Drew



I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.

- Ann Richards



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



Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

- Mortimer Adler



All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

- Amy Lowell



For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.

Boston Athenaeum

- Amy Lowell



I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

- Henry G. Strauss



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



Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

- Mark Twain



Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson