- A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~James Bryce
A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron
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
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
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Groucho Marx
I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. ~Groucho Marx
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ~William Hazlitt
In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~Stéphane Mallarmé
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. ~James Russell Lowell
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." ~Helen Exley
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. ~George Steiner
My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. ~Thomas Helm
This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. ~Elbert Hubbard
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ~Mark Twain
A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off. ~Charles B. Fairbanks
You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney
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
Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~Bern Williams
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ~Henry David Thoreau
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. ~Franz Kafka
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
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. ~Charles de Secondat
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
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. ~Jesse Lee Bennett
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. ~Washington Irving
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before. ~Clifton Fadiman
For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. ~Francis Bacon
A book that is shut is but a block. ~Thomas Fuller
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
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. ~E.P. Whipple
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ~Gilbert Highet
"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread. ~François Mauriac
Books are embalmed minds. ~Bovee
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~Samuel Butler
The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book. ~André Maurois
A house without books is like a room without windows. ~Heinrich Mann
Never judge a book by its movie. ~J.W. Eagan
Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. ~John Lyly
I like intellectual reading. It's to my mind what fiber is to my body. ~Grey Livingston
I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words. ~Laurence Sterne
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. ~Arabic Proverb
An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. ~Augustine Birrell
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~Richard Steele
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. ~Amos Bronson Alcott
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written. ~Oscar Wilde
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. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. ~Charles Kingsley
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
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. ~Francis Bacon
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. ~Henry David Thoreau
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. ~Mary Wortley Montagu
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. ~Henry Miller
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. ~Holbrook Jackson
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
Please post any other quotes about books and reading that you like.