Quotes About Knowledge

wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite.

understood how fundamental books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity

Quoting a letter by Charles F. Lummis]: books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.

people of the book.

The library is a magnificent institution which nothing can hinder . . . except peanut politics

In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place--it is a transit point, a passage.

It was like everyone shared the same great realization: the libraries have persisted, and they have grown, and they will certainly endure.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Chief Aguirre said as we began to walk around the building. "Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that's something to keep in mind.

Over the years, he has become a sort of library himsel: He is the repository of endless stories about the library's most interesting patrons.

Encyclopedias?" he asked George. "So damn heavy.

In fact, Perry was passionate, but his passion was exclusively for libraries, and he judged people by whether or not they shared his passion.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.

One of the many optimistic convictions punctured by the riots was the belief that books were good and true - that on the shelves of libraries, you could find all the answers to all the questions. Life now seemed juddering and inexplicable, beyond the reach of what we could ever know or understand.

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.

Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.

In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.

books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.

She had always been different, even when she tried not to be, unable to curb her curiosity which led her to read a great number of books. Her world was constantly expanding until she could no longer fit herself into the culture that was most important to her.

It does not mean that adults think of a child as a blank sheet of paper on which they imprint their ideas, impressions, and knowledge. Neither does it mean leaving the child unattended like a weed growing in a sidewalk. It is a balanced understanding of education as the provision of possibilities for a person to build relationships with a vast number of things and thoughts.