Quotes About Books

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

The crowds and centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of those few great voices of Time.

When an artist runs out of inspiration or a scholar wearies of books, they always have the ability to live. Character is more important than intellect. Life is primary; our thoughts about it are secondary.

The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past,—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,—learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,—by considering their value alone.

What is the right use of books? For inspiration. Books exist for your benefit, not you for theirs. Your most precious possession is your own soul. Better to never see a book than to have it pull you out of your orbit, so that your life now revolves around that book instead of around your own soul.

Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

Libraries raised me.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing... It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

Do you ever read any of the books you burn? He laughed. That's against the law! Oh. Of course.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.

Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

Garrett, said Stendahl, do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn't do that for you. I'm sorry.

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.

The library is always an adventure!