Library Quotations

The true university these days is a collection of books.
- Thomas Carlyle
To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.
- Cicero
No furniture so charming as books.
- Sydney Smith
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
- Barbara Tuchman
Your library is your portrait.
- Holbrook Jackson
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now -- only that place where the books are kept.
- John Steinbeck
A good book is the best of friends.
- English Proverb
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
- Mark Twain
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested
- Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"
Libraries are the mind and soul of their communities, and librarians are the mind and soul of the library
-- ALA
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body
-- Sir Richard Steel
Libraries are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
- Edwin P. Whipple

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
- Descartes

 People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.
- Thomas Hobbes
People will not be better than the books they read.
- Bishop Potter
Choose an author as you would a friend.
- Wentworth Dillon
Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
- Henry David Thoreau
One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly.
- Edmund Clarence Stedman
Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.
- Charles F. Kettering
Seventy million books in America's libraries, but the one you want to read is always out.
- Tom Masson

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
 -  Cicero

"The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read."

    -  Tom Clancy

Nothing is pleasanter than exploring a library.

    -   Walter Savage Landor