Books & Reading Quotes

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies... I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."”

“There is no thief worse than a bad book.”

“People say that Life is the thing, but I prefer Reading.”

“Wilde strikes an evangel note. It is a note that lifts itself through sorrow and slavery to joy and freedom. Puts seed in the ground. Into you. When a book stops doing that it is dead. No matter how pretty it may be as a corpse it is dead.”

“We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.”

“Have you blossoms and books, those solaces of sorrow?”

“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”

“The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond shadow of doubt, that that book must be his — not necessarily now, but some time — is among the happiest excitements of the spirit... There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import... It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.”

“Somewhere at a summer conference, I dropped several books casually on the ground and kicked them out of the way. A German student picked up the books, dusted them off gently. He said how he had worked for years to buy a few books. A book was his blood, and he bled when he saw it mishandled.”

“Add three or four new authors each year so that as you grow old you will not slip into the past tense.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“A Book, though mainly as the Writer makes it, Is also largely as the Reader takes it.”