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Books Quotes

Samuel Johnson is on this page more than once for good reason. In The Rambler (1750) he wrote that no place gives a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. Boswell (1791) has him saying that a man ought to read just as inclination leads him, because what he reads as a task will do him little good. Alberto Manguel, Emerson and Northrop Frye are among the most-quoted writers here, which is what you would expect from people who spent their working lives reading.

Two entries are flagged as misattributed. The quip about a manuscript that is both good and original, with the good parts not original and the original parts not good, is credited to Johnson. “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” is credited to General Patton.

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Most quoted on books:

I had rather than forty shillings, I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.

William Shakespeare

O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast;
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.

William Shakespeare

And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.

William Shakespeare

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
When I am not walking, I am reading;
I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

Charles Lamb

What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Ray Bradbury

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

John Milton Areopagitica (1644)

Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards.

Andrew Tate

You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.

Richard de Bury

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul.

Emily Dickinson

I armed her against the censures of the world; showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it.

Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

It is to Rome and Roman literature that we must turn to find the earliest examples of affectionate and confidential letters passing between members of the same family, and between friends of the same tastes and sympathies.

Augustus Jessopp

One cannot help feeling that its guardians sometimes miss the point of literature, which is not to cut gems of flashing and exquisite rarity but to communicate, to convey a meaning, an art, a story, a fantasy, even a mystery, to someone.

Barbara Tuchman

The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

Federico Fellini I'm a Born Liar (2003)

I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about.

Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed."

Anne Rice The Witching Hour (1990)

We read to know that we are not alone.

William Nicholson Shadowlands (1993)

The pleasant books, that silently among
Our household treasures take familiar places,
And are to us as if a living tongue
Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

Roger Zelazny

I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand

Grace Paley with Poets & Writers (2008)

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