Quotes About Books

Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.

On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." [As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges , The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town , The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Ayudar a que la persona encuentre ese libro que le habla, y que tiene significado especial para ella, debe de ser maravilloso.

La naturaleza es hermosa, que la vida es un deber, que la muerte no es fea, que nadie debe estar triste ni acobardarse mientras haya libros en las librerías, y luz en el cielo, y amigos, y madres.

I fear for my books.

My opinions were formed by books, and I know only what men have brought to light; I know nothing of the things that remain hidden, that have not been written about.

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

Reading is to the mind what exerise is to the body.

I get up in the morning, do my e-mail, I check my e-mails all day. I'll go online and I'll buy my books at Amazon.com, but I don't want to buy all of them because I want to go to Duttons and I want to buy books from another human being.

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

There is a sure rule for judging books just as there is for judging men: it is enough to know by whom they are loved, and by whom they are hated.

I like to keep my books in my library, he said, 'and I like my library to get bigger rather than smaller.

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written 'Explicit, Deo Gratias ('Finished, thank god')...Books are kept not on open shelves, but in locked chests.

A Jewish ethical treatise warns that a man must not express his anger by pounding on a book or by hitting people with it. The angry teacher must not hit the bad student with a book, nor should the student use a book to ward off blows.

My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.