Library quotes

I am copying below a list of library quotations I have compiled over the years. While this is not directly related to School Library Learning, I received a request from Jackie Siminitus, one of the creators of the program, to post them on my blog. Feel free to enjoy them.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-William James

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-S.J. Perelman

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past.
-Amy Lowell

Technology: opening minds with a new set of keys.
-Anonymous

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most.
-Theodore Parker

The newest books are those that never grow old.
-George Holbrook Jackson

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
-George Savile

The end of reading is not more books but more life.
-Holbrook Jackson

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-Henry Adams

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
-Thomas Jefferson

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
-Stephen Vincent Benet

Education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.
-Pete Seeger

A book is a most delightful companion. It gives, and does not take.
-Moses Ibn Ezra

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
-Malcolm X

Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.
-Jim Rohn

The librarian’s recipe for long life: keep breathing.
-The Frugal Librarian

Books have the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.
-Jim Bishop

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
-Harper Lee

Man is what he reads.
-Joseph Brodsky

He that loves reading, has everything within his reach.
-William Godwin

Every book must be chewed to get out its juice.
-Chinese Proverb

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.
-Mary McLeod Bethune

Books are the door of escape from the forest.
-E.B. White

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all the time.
-John Ruskin

What you don’t know would make a great book.
-Sydney Smith

What is reading, but silent conversation.
-Walter Savage Landor


Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
-W. Fusselman

Freedom of the press only has real meaning if people know how to read.
-The Frugal Librarian

You don’t have to burn the books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
-Ray Bradbury

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.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

As I read, my ears are opened to the magic of the spoken word.
-Richard Wright

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-Cicero

If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.
-Thelma Green

Books are humanity in print.
-Barbara Tuchman

A book may be compared to a neighbor; if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
-Rupert Brooke

That is a good bookwhich is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
-A. Bronson Alcott


Books are quiet. They do not dissolve into wavy lines or snowstorm effects. They do not pause to deliver commercials. They are three-dimensional, having length, breadth and depth. They are convenient to handle and completely portable.
-Anonymous

If the riches of the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdoms in Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
_Francois Fenelon

Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some to be chewed and digested.
-Francis Bacon

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
-Lady Mary Montague

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
-Joseph Brodsky

What better book can there be than the book of humanity.
-Mohandas Gandhi

There are three basic rules about library research; unfortunately, no one remembers what they are.
-The Frugal Library

A real book is not the one that we read, but that read us.
_W.H. Auden

The man ho does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
-Mark Twain

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
-H.L. Mencken

Books are not made for furniture. But there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes the home.
-Henry Ward Beecher

I am a part of everything that I have read.
-John Kieran

Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers hang them. Librarians put theirs on the book sale shelf.
-The Frugal Librarian

Our concern for the future can be tested by how well we support our libraries.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

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

When the sun rises, nature wakes up; when a book is read, the mind is enlightened.
-Mongolian Saying

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts: monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on.
-Clarence Day

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine-everybody drinks water.
-Mark Twain

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
-Thomas Carlyle

Read in order to live.
-Gustave Flaubert

A library is thought in cold storage.
-Herbert Samuel

A library is a hospital for the mind.
-Anonymous

I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy.
-Frank Zappa

We are what we read.
-Richard Saul Wurman

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
-Mortimer J. Adler

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
-Edmund Burke

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
-Barbara Tuchman

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron

Librarian is a service occupation ... gas station attendant to the mind.
- Richard Powers