What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times.

Speech in Birmingham Town Hall (1 June 1882), quoted in William Robertson, Life and Times of the Right Hon. John Bright (1883), p. 522. Variation in C. N. Douglas, Forty Thousand Quotations (1917): "What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past time. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me."