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Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites. (Lord Acton)
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you. (Mortimer J. Adler)
Books are the true means of acquiring talent, for if one does not read one remains ignorant, and ignorance can never produce true painters. (Francesco Albani)
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. (W. H. Auden)
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. (Sir Francis Bacon)
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Roland Barthes)
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. (Henry Ward Beecher)
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. (Saul Bellow)
Books are not men and yet they stay alive. (Stephen Vincent Benet)
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. (Jesse Lee Bennett)
-one-sentence book review...
The covers of this book are too far apart. (Ambrose Bierce)
novel, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. (Ambrose Bierce)
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is. (Allan Bloom)
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well. (Daniel J. Boorstin)
-Poem of the Gifts, 1959 (trans. by Alastair Reid)
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library. (Jorge Luis Borges)
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. (Ray Bradbury)
You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it. (Ray Bradbury)
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties. (Art Buchwald)
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read. (Robert Bulwer-Lytton)
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. (Anthony Burgess)
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. (Samuel Butler)
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them. (Samuel Butler)
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. (Italo Calvino)
No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. (Thomas Carlyle)
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. (Thomas Carlyle)
The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. (Paul Cezanne)
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public. (Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort)
If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come. (Raymond Chandler)
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. (Raymond Chandler)
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. (Charlie Chaplin)
-paraphrased...
Go, little book, go, little mine tragedy. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books. (Earl of Chesterfield)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. (G. K. Chesterton)
The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed. (G. K. Chesterton)
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading. (Rufus Choate)
Anyone who has a book collection wants for nothing. (Cicero)
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason – they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. (Charles Caleb Colton)
I have this theory that it is the dream of most educated people to own/work in a bookstore. (Megan Coughlin)
A good book has no ending. (R. D. Cumming)
I have read novels that have made me a better man; I have also read novels that made me wish the author were a better man. (Dennis Danvers)
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the centuries past. (Rene Descartes)
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. (Charles Dickens)
There is no frigate like a book. (Emily Dickinson)
A book may be as great a thing as a battle. (Benjamin Disraeli)
When I want to read a good book, I write one. (Benjamin Disraeli)
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. (E. L. Doctorow)
-on Shakespeare...
He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. (John Dryden)
Never judge a book by its movie. (J. W. Eagan)
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes)
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living. (Tryon Edwards)
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. (Albert Einstein)
What I have to say about this book can be found inside the book. (Albert Einstein)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. (Charles W. Eliot)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends and the most patient of teachers. (Charles W. Eliot)
Some books leave us free and some books make us free. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it... (Nora Ephron)
Your library is your paradise. (Desiderius Erasmus)
When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes. (Desiderius Erasmus)
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. (Clifton Fadiman)
Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn. (Clifton Fadiman)
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out. (B. C. Forbes)
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves. (E. M. Forster)
One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it. (E. M. Forster)
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. (E. M. Forster)
The books that everybody admires are those nobody reads. (Anatole France)
Never lend a book, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that others have lent me. (Anatole France)
A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books. (Stephen Fry)
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body. (Margaret Fuller)
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India. (Edward Gibbon)
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. (Edward Gibbon)
A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. (Oliver Goldsmith)
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one. (Oliver Goldsmith)
I read part of it all the way through. (Samuel Goldwyn)
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. (Elizabeth Hardwick)
I rarely read or buy a book because of a review. (Jim Harrison)
From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot above the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings. (Helen Hayes)
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. (William Hazlitt)
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom. (Heinrich Heine)
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. (Claude Adrien Helvetius)
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. (Ernest Hemingway)
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other. (Ernest Hemingway)
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. (George Herbert)
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. (Gilbert Highet)
Books may well be the only true magic. (Alice Hoffman)
Reading is like permitting a man to talk a long time, and refusing you the right to answer. (Edgar Watson Howe)
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all. (William Dean Howells)
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low. (Aldous Huxley)
The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense. (Aldous Huxley)
It's my experience that all good art is self-taught – whether realist or abstract. And books are the gold mine of technical information on the subject of materials and their interaction. (Joe Jahn)
I cannot live without books. (Thomas Jefferson)
A man will turn over half a library to make one book. (Samuel Johnson)
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. (Samuel Johnson)
In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now. (Samuel Johnson)
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. (Joseph Joubert)
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. (Franz Kafka)
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive. (Alfred Kazin)
-Powell's Books, interview...
A cookbook must have recipes, but it shouldn't be a blueprint. The book is there for inspiration and as a foundation, the fundamentals on which to build. (Thomas Keller)
Books are a uniquely portable magic. (Stephen King)
Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? (Karl Kraus)
Why do you want to read others' books when there is the book of yourself? (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
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)
Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. (Charles Lamb)
What is reading but silent conversation? (Walter Savage Landor)
He who praises a good book becomingly, is next in merit to the author. (Walter Savage Landor)
Get stewed. Books are a load of crap. (Philip Larkin)
If it weren't for the law, I would steal books; if it weren't for my purse, I would buy them. (Harold Joseph Laski)
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. (John LeCarre)
By and large books are mankind's best invention. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. (C. S. Lewis)
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
To read means to borrow; to create out of one's readings is paying off one's debts. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. (Abraham Lincoln)
Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. (John Locke)
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, / And all the sweet serenity of books. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. (James Russell Lowell)
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing. (Martin Luther)
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read. (Thomas B. Macaulay)
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst. (Ford Maddox)
Every one of my books has killed me a little more. (Norman Mailer)
An art book is a museum without walls. (Andre Malraux)
I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. (Groucho Marx)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. (Groucho Marx)
There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want is always out. (Thomas L. Masson)
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. (H. L. Mencken)
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life. (John Milton)
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. (S. Weir Mitchell)
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. (Mary Wortley Montagu)
I am myself the subject of my book; it is not reasonable to expect you to waste your leisure on a matter so frivolous and empty. (Michel de Montaigne)
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. (Baron de Montesquieu)
Read every day something no one else is reading. Think something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity. (Christopher Morley)
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. (Christopher Morley)
If there's a book you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. (Toni Morrison)
I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention... (John Muir)
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. (Kathleen Norris)
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it. (Flannery O'Connor)
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. (P. J. O'Rourke)
It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them. (Sir William Osler)
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. (Dorothy Parker)
The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. (Theodore Parker)
Wear the old coat and buy the new book. (Austin Phelps)
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read / With loads of learned lumber in his head. (Alexander Pope)
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. (Ezra Pound)
A book, tight shut, is but a block of paper. (Chinese proverb)
The book you don't read won't help. (Jim Rohn)
Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it. (Jim Rohn)
Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book. (Jim Rohn)
I hate books. They only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. (Henri Rousseau)
I hate books, they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. (John Ruskin)
There are two reasons for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it, the other that you can boast about it. (Bertrand Russell)
-(1934 - 1996)
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. (Carl Sagan)
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. (J. D. Salinger)
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. (J. D. Salinger)
A library is thought in cold storage. (Herbert Samuel)
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books. (George Santayana)
Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up... (Arthur Schopenhauer)
The big advantage of a book is it's very easy to rewind. Close it and you're right back at the beginning. (Jerry Seinfeld)
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness. (Vincent Starret)
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. (Richard Steele)
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road. (Stendhal)
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. (William Styron)
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent... (Henry David Thoreau)
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. (Henry David Thoreau)
If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed. (Lily Tomlin)
Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, 50 books per year, and will guarantee your success. (Brian Tracy)
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. (George Macaulay Trevelyan)
Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable. (Anthony Trollope)
A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. (Martin Farquhar Tupper)
The man who does not read good books, has no advantage over the man who can't read them. (Mark Twain)
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. (Mark Twain)
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. (Mark Twain)
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. (John Updike)
The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. (Thorstein Veblen)
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. (Voltaire)
I have always had more books on art than room to display them all. (Milos Vujasinovic)
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. (John Greenleaf Whittier)
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. (Oscar Wilde)
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. (Oscar Wilde)
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure. (Peregrine Worsthorne)
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, re-enacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare. (Andrew Wyeth)
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. (Malcolm X)
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