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There is nothing like the love of books …

• My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. Malcolm X
• Some women have a weakness for shoes… I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books. Oprah Winfrey
• The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. Phillip Adams
• If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading I would spurn them all. Francois Fenelon
• Writing,  Reading,  Knowledge,  Learning

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… especially a favourite book

• If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs. Anne Fadiman
• In other words, it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!” Nick Hornby
• Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you. Louis L’Amour
• There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Marcel Proust

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Books are as important as food and shelter

• I cannot live without books. Thomas Jefferson
• Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book. Jim Rohn
• When I was in my twenties and broke, I’d buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life. Gabrielle Zevin
• When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. Erasmus
• When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved. Mark Twain
• Wear the old coat and buy the new book. Austin Phelps
• With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy. Lope de Vega
• A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. George R.R. Martin
• Human needs

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Books are a gift

• A book is a gift you can open again and again. Garrison Keillor
• The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days. Sue Monk Kidd

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Books are one of life’s simplest but greatest joys

• I honestly believe there is absolutely nothing like going to bed with a good book… or a friend who’s read one. Oscar Levant
• I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Wisława Szymborska
• 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
• It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book…from the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. Gordon B. Hinckley
• Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Kathleen Norias
• With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? Oscar Wilde
• Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. Jane Smiley
• Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hours spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning. Rose Macauley
• You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. S. Lewis
• With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy. Lope de Vega
• Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Sleep is good, he said, and books are better. George R.R. Martin
• Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain
• Simple joys

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Books are a kind of magic

• Books are a uniquely portable magic. Stephen King
• Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future. Jim Bishop
• I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book. J.K. Rowling
• I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books- whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. Cecelia Ahern
• Magic

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Books are a portal to a new world …

• Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it. Thomas Hardy
• Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. Laura Miller
• At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers– shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Alberto Manguel
• Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map. Stephen King
• Discovery,  Exploration

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… allowing us to travel and explore from an armchair

• In books I have travelled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. Anna Quindlen
• My grandfather says that’s what books are for,” Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch. Jhumpa Lahiri
• You can travel the world and never leave your chair when you read a book. Sherry K. Plummer
• There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings. E. Stevenson, Listening Valley
• The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden- day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village. Roald Dahl
• Travel

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Book are a portal to more life

• For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives. Amy Lowell
• I often feel sorry for people who don’t read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. Scott Corbett
• How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! Henry David Thoreau

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Books are a mirror and we see in them what is inside us

• A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person. Chanakya
• Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out. C. Forbes
• Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things. Joseph Joubert
• Life is a mirror

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Books are machines of change

• Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life. Helen Exley
• Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves. Lloyd Alexander
• Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. Alberto Manguel
• [Books] are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. Barbara W. Tuchman
• The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book. Northrop Frye
• Change

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Books are the carriers of civilization and history

• Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. Barbara W. Tuchman
• It is only through books that we partake of the great harvest that is human civilization across the ages. Ibrahim Babangida
• Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. Hermann Hes

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Books are a communion with great minds …

• It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds… In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. William Ellery Channing
• It is in fact one of the charms of this book, that it has gathered its contents from almost every latitude and longitude, and sometimes from the opposite poles of thought. Jew, Pagan, and Christian—classic and patristic—primitive and recent authors—furnish each his quota to the design. Men are here found standing side by side who were wide apart in time, space, and character—agreeing in nothing, except that they thought on the same subject, and thought well. James Elmes
• What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. Carl Sagan
• Books are the shoes with which we tread the footsteps of great minds.

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… some dead for 1000’s of years

• One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. Carl Sagan
• What a blessing it is to love books as I love them; – to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! Thomas Babington Macaulay
• Books are whispers of the past heard well into the future. Keri Douglas

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Books are a delving into the mind and soul of the author

• Reading a book is like having the ability to dip a straw into the author’s soul and sip and slurp without lowering the water table of wisdom. Jarod Kintz
• Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book. Cynthia Heimel
• These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. Gilbert Highet
• Mind,  Soul

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Books are a companionship with the author

• Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find. Patrick Rothfuss
• Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. B. White
• Friends, books, a cheerful heart, and conscience clear are the most choice companions we have here. William Mather
• 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. That doesn’t happen much, though. D. Salinger
• You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. Paul Sweeney
• Friendship

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Books are a conversation with the author

• The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries. Descartes
• To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations–such is a pleasure beyond compare. Kenko Yoshida
• A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. Henry Ward Beecher
• Conversation

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Books are beehives of thought

• Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. Susan Sonrag
• Books are the beehives of thought; laconics, the honey taken from them. James Ellis
• Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. Maturin M. Ballou
• Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all. Abraham Lincoln
• He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library. Milan Kundera
• It is in fact one of the charms of this book, that it has gathered its contents from almost every latitude and longitude, and sometimes from the opposite poles of thought. Jew, Pagan, and Christian—classic and patristic—primitive and recent authors—furnish each his quota to the design. Men are here found standing side by side who were wide apart in time, space, and character—agreeing in nothing, except that they thought on the same subject, and thought well. James Elmes
• What did I do? I read. I followed the path from one book to another, from one thinker to another. I followed my bliss, though I didn’t know that was what I was doing. Joseph Campbell
• Read books. Not just self-help or motivational books, but any book that has new ideas. New ideas get your mental gears turning and can build motivation. Geoffrey James
• The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. Theodore Parker
• Ideas,  Thinking

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Books are a repository for all the insights and secrets of the world

• All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk. Lemony Snicket
• All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books. The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read? Jim Rohn
• Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once. Stephen King
• Insight

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Books hold great influence

• I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves. M. Forster
• The books that influence the world are those that it has not read. G.K. Chesterton
• Influence

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Books break the chains of reality

• Books, and only books, give me a chance to escape the realms of reality. Priyanka Darji
• Reality

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Books help us learn

• You cannot open a book without learning something. Confucius
• What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. Thomas Carlyle
• The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Books have led some to learning and others to madness. Petrarch
• Education is the process of selling someone on books. Douglas Wilson
• My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. Malcolm X
• We could revolutionize education if we asked every person connected with the education of children, “Read any good books lately?” Susan Ohanian
• Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand. Bette Greene
• Learning

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Books help us grow

• Nothing is lost upon a person who is bent upon growth; nothing is wasted on one who is always preparing for his work and life by keeping eyes, mind, and heart open to nature, men, books, experience. Such a man finds ministries to his education on all sides; everything cooperates with his passion for growth. Hamilton Mabie
• You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read. Charles Jones
• Growth

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Books help us rise above the ordinary

• Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives. Jim Rohn
• The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t. Mark Twain
• You should never read just for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behaviour, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid. John Waters
• Transcendence

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Books help us empathise and connect with others

• Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin. Ann Patchett
• I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. Nikki Giovanni
• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. James Baldwin
• Empathy,  Connection

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Books can add to our lives and help us live more …

• When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue–you sell him a whole new life. Christopher Morley
• A good book is an event in my life. Stendhal
• A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. William Styron
• Being fully alive

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… but can also get in the way of life

• There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. H. L. Menchen

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Books help us discover who we are

• We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. Ursula K. Le Guin
• Self-knowledge

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Books help mould who we are

• You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read. Charles Jones
• We become the books we read. Matthew Kelly

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Books help comfort us, especially in dark times

• In the winter, she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold. Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes
• Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. Alberto Manguel
• When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books, they quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind. Michel Eyquem De Michel de Montaigne
• The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters. Ross Macdonald
• Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. Jane Smiley
• Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books. Jackson Pearce
• Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
• Comfort,  Darkness

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Books help make us whole

• We are made whole by books, as by great space and the stars. Mary Carolyn Davies
• Completeness

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Books help us navigate life

• Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life. Arlaina
• 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
• Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand. Bette Greene

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Books helps us acquire wisdom …

• If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero… You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out. Charlie Munger
• A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books. Richard de Bury
• Wisdom

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… the wisdom of the those who’ve gone before us

• Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence…Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually. William Ellery Channing
• To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you. Elie Wiesel

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Books inspire us

• Most of my inspiration, if that’s the word, came from books themselves. Shelby Foote
• Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration. Gavin Rossdale
• Passion doesn’t come from business or books or even a connection with another person. It is a connection to your own life force, the world around you and the spirit that connects us all.  You are the source.  Books, work, music, people, sunsets all provide sparks, but only you can light the fire.  Jennifer James
• It’s not what you will get out of the books that is so enriching – it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life. Robin S. Sharma
• Inspiration

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Books illuminate

• Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. Vera Nazarian
• Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. Alberto Manguel
• Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. Barbara W. Tuchman
• A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. Robertson Davies
• Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. Ezra Pound
• Light

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Books ignite the imagination

• A book is a device to ignite the imagination. Alan Bennett
• Imagination

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Books show what is possible

• I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared. Jonathan Safran Foer
• Possibility

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Books provide a new way of looking at things

• When I’m really into a novel, I’m seeing the world differently during that time – not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism. Colin Firth
• The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest. Romain Rolland
• Perception,  Perspective

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Good books demand to be reread

• A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. Holbrook Jackson

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Good books make us dream

• What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading. Rikki Ducorne
• Dreams,  Dreaming

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Good books stimulate, broaden and ignite the mind

• We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things. Joseph Joubert
• The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest. Romain Rolland
• Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. Vera Nazarian

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Good books add to life

• A good book is an event in my life. Stendhal
• A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. William Styron
• I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came? Lawrence Clark Powell

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Good books are made to be thoroughly digested

• Some books are the be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested. Francis Bacon
• Some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Francis Bacon
• Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly. Cornelia Funke

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Great books tell you what we already know

• The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours. Alan Bennett
• The best books… are those that tell you what you know already. George Orwell
• Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. Alberto Manguel
• Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you. Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
• Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept. Carl Becker
• Knowledge

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Great books endure, retaining their relevance

• All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time. John Ruskin
• What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation. Lawrence Clark Powell
• Greatness

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More thoughts on great books

• A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. Mark Twain
• All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. Ernest Hemingway
• You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. Paul Sweeney
• In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. Mortimer Jerome Adler

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Thoughts on bad books

• A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. Aldous Huxley
• One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited. Arthur Schopenhauer

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Books should be a catalyst to questioning and self-enquiry

• I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me. Herman Hesse
• Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book. Bruce Lee
• Only one book is worth reading: the heart. Ajahn Chah
• Re-examine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul. Walt Whitman
• Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. Buddha
• If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. Mortimer Adler
• Questions

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Books should be a catalyst to reflection

• The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. Christopher Morley
• The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. Pablo Neruda
• It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth. Frederick William Robertson
• Reflection

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Books should be a catalyst to deep conversations

• A single conversation across the table with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books. Chinese Proverb
• Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books. Stephen Fry
• Conversation

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Books should be a catalyst to real world observation

• Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose. Joseph Brodsky
• Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators. Amos Bronson Alcott
• One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy. Willard Van Orman Quine
• The wise man reads both books and life itself. Lin Yutang
• Observation

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Books should be a catalyst to real life experience …

• No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. Ezra Pound
• Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone. Horace
• We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey. John Hope Franklin
• The end of reading is not more books, but more life. Holbrook Jackson
• Experience

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… for that is how real learning happens

• The young man who has the combination of the learning of books with the learning which comes of doing things with the hands need not worry about getting along in the world today, or at any time. William S. Knudsen
• The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have first-hand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern. Chogyam Trungpa
• The experience to be gathered from books, though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life, is of the nature of wisdom and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than a stock of the former. Samuel Smiles
• Wisdom is not to be obtained from textbooks, but must be coined out of human experience in the flame of life. Morris Raphael Cohen
• There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Learning

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Books, especially books of scripture, should be a catalyst to practice

• Whatever books you may read, you cannot realize the Divine merely by intellectual effort. One must put it into practice. That sense of oneness can only be promoted by the practice of love and not by any other means. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• Too much study of the scriptures does more harm than good. The important thing is to know the essence of the scriptures. After that, what is the need of books? One should learn the essence and then dive deep in order to realize God. Ramakrishna
• That which transforms your life is what you practice. And what you practice constitutes your personal laws of life—not what you merely believe in, but what you practice. It’s all well and good to read books, and to attend seminars, lectures, and workshops, and to say, ‘Oh, that really resonates with me! It’s now part of my life’s philosophy.’ Your philosophy may give you a temporary state of euphoria, but if you want to be anchored in reality, it takes practice, practice, practice. We are not here to be euphoric but to get free. Rudimentary spirituality is theory; advanced spirituality is practice. Michael Bernard Beckwith
• Reading a dozen books isn’t worth a week’s practice. Joan Borysenko
• Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don’t keep reading the book. You have to travel. That’s what practice is about. Traveling. Walking the path. Bill Porter
• Reading their books over and over again, people continue making mistakes; they are so proud of their religious robes. But what is the use of bathing at sacred shrines of pilgrimage, when the filth of stubborn pride is within the mind? Sri Guru Granth Sahib
• Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It’s the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow- holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it. George Horace Lorimer
• I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? Swami Satchidananda
• Spiritual practice,  Practice

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Books should be a catalyst to action

• A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. Henry David Thoreau
• Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton Tibensky
• The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you cannot get out of them a drop of water. So, you cannot get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed. Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
• Action

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Read books everyday

• If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it. G. Wells
• The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t. Mark Twain
• 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
• Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on yourself. Enjoy the ever- present game of knowing. Hank Green
• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. Ray Bradbury
• All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books. The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read? Jim Rohn
• Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you’re working. Tell them it’s research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone. Jennifer Weiner

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Read different books by different authors

• Read articles and books and speak to people with entirely different points of view from our own. We form opinions, then spend our whole lives validating what we believe to be true. There so much we can learn and explore. Richard Carlson
• Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style. R.L. Stine
• There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty- eight. Ezra Pound
• A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints. Wilfred Peterson

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Read books by authors who grab you and make you feel alive

• Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Joseph Campbell

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If you really love a book, read it again and again …

• I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. S. Lewis
• You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice. John Lothrop Motley
• If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. Oscar Wilde
• Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar. Cornelia Funke
• 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. James Goldsmith
• There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read only once can’t. Gail Carson Levine
• A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement. Holbrook Jackson
• A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. Robertson Davies

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… for you’ll find something new each time

• Each time we re-read a book we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book. Murial Clark
• When you re-read a classic, you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.   Clifton Fadiman

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Spend lots of time in libraries

• Come with me,’ Mom says. To the library. Books and summertime go together. Lisa Schroeder
• The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don’t, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper. Polly Horvath

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Don’t be scared to mark your books for books are made for scribbling in and underlining

• When I’m reading archaeologically, I’m not reading for pleasure. I read the way I scratch for an idea, digging down deep so I can get something out of it and use it in my work. I read transactionally: How can I use this? It’s not enough for me to read a book. I have to “own” it. I scribble in the margins. I circle sentences I like and connect them with arrows to other useful sentences. I draw stars and exclamation points on every good page, to the point where the book is almost unreadable. By writing all over the pages, I transform the author’s work into my book—and mine alone. Twyla Tharp
• For myself, well, Alan Watts once asked me what spiritual practice I followed. I told him, ‘I underline books.’ It’s all in how you approach it. Joseph Campbell

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There is not enough time to read all books

• There are too many books in the world to read in a single life time. You have to draw the line somewhere. Diane Setterfield
• So many books, so little time. Frank Zappa
• I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see. John Burroughs
• You will miss a ton, but that’s OK. We’re so caught up in trying to do everything, experience all the essential things, not miss out on anything important that we forget the simple fact that we cannot experience everything. That physical reality dictates we’ll miss most things. We can’t read all the good books, watch all the good films, go to all the best cities in the world, try all the best restaurants, meet all the great people. But the secret is: life is better when we don’t try to do everything. Learn to enjoy the slice of life you experience, and life turns out to be wonderful. Leo Babauta
• Time

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In fact, life is far too short to read anything but good books

• Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading useless books. John Ruskin
• Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau
• Do not read good books–life is too short for that–read only the best. Ernest Dimnet
• One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited. Arthur Schopenhauer
• When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. Arthur Schopenhauer
• The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.  Arthur Schopenhauer
• Life is fleeting

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Choose the books you read carefully

• Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. Paxton Hood
• The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,’ The medicines of the soul.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
• Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired. Moliere

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Choose books that make you come alive

• Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. Ezra Pound
• If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson
• Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. John Green
• Being fully alive

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Choose books that open your mind

• Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can. William Feather
• Open-mindedness

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By all means watch the movie but read the book first

• A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Graham Greene
• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. John le Carré
• I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Karen Marie Moning
• You can’t tell a book by its movie. Louis A. Safian
• If you were forced to read the book in high school, you’ll probably hate the movie too. Wharton’s Law
• Never judge a book by its movie. W. Eagan
• You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one. Elif Safak
• You can’t tell a book by its movie. Louis A. Safian
• The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That’s why we go to movies and say, “Oh, the book is better. Paulo Coelho
• Movies

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Always choose books over television

• Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom. Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose.  Oliver DeMille
• I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. Groucho Marx
• 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
• Many people use the television to fall asleep or relax at the end of the day, and this is a mistake. Not only does the light suppress melatonin production, but television can actually stimulate the mind, rather than relaxing it. Try listening to music or audio books instead, or practicing relaxation exercises. Jeanne Segal
• On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead. Stephen Chbosky
• You know you’re working class when your TV is bigger than your bookcase. Rob Beckett
• When I was your age, television was called books. William Goldman
• The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. Andrew Ross
• So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place, you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall. Roald Dahl
• If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they’ll have with twenty-six.  Open your child’s imagination. Open a book.
• Watch less television

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Encourage children to read and love books …

• I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage. Roald Dahl
• Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books–they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past. Esther Meynell
• Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. George Bernard Shaw
• My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent’s rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says ‘PRIVATE- -GROWNUPS KEEP OUT’: a child sprawled on the bed, reading. Anne Fadiman
• We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. F. Skinner
• There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book. Frank Serafini
• There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book– the past and the future entrancing each other. Roger Rosenblau
• Child raising

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… for books can give children wings

• From your parents, you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings. Helen Hayes
• When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child’s hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener. Paula Fox
• At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers– shivered into meaning. Words spoken to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Alberto Manguel
• Trusting children and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don’t know what might happen. Susan Ohanian

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Be thankful for books

• You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, and swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in ink. G. K. Chesterton
• Gratitude

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There comes a time comes in life when we must stop reading books and write one

• If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. Toni Morrison
• One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper. Michael Cunningham
• You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic. Ellen DeGeneres
• Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. Winston Churchill
• Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. George Orwell
• You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown- ups, then you write it for children. Madeleine L’Engle
• What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I’m very proud. Louis Sachar
• The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson
• The time comes in life when we have read enough. It’s time to stop reading. It’s time to lay down the books and write. Albert Einstein
• Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. Salman Rushdie
• Writing

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Write a book that enriches others

• A writer must try to think clearly, to feel deeply, to write honestly. If he is fortunate he will make a living, but his work will never be anymore essentially clear and deep and honest than he himself is, and he will be judged finally not for how many copies his books have sold, but for what they have done to enrich the lives of their readers, now and in time to come. Lawrence Clark Powell

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Write a book that will become your legacy

• Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children. Marguerite Yourcenar
• Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we’ll never meet. It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt.  Simon Van Booy
• A writer doesn’t dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations. K. Webb
• Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. Joseph Addison
• Leaving a legacy

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To write a book requires reading many books

• You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. Ray Bradbury
• Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. Lisa See

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A book you write is never complete until it is read

• A book is not completed till it’s read. Salman Rushdie
• A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it. Samuel Johnson
• And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is. Paul Auster

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Never follow a book blindly; especially if it’s scripture

• Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’. Richard Dawkins
• When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much. Fen-Yang

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Truth cannot be shut up in a single book

• Beware the man of a single book. St. Thomas Aquinas
• All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, – those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Sri Aurobindo
• Truth

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Look to the world for God, rather than simply through books

• It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Let none turn over books or scan the stars in quest of God who see Him not in man. Johann Kaspar Lavater
• God

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Books are an abundant source of metaphors for life

• Men are just like a book – with a beginning, middle and an end. Pamela Anderson
• The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. Dag Hammarskjöld
• Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass. Japanese Proverb
• You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat. Paul Brown
• People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way. Ashly Lorenzana
• A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood. Chinese Proverbs
• Life metaphors

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Life is a book filled with riddles and mystery

• The book of life is filled with incoherent riddles. Life’s true lessons are inscribed in a corner of the margin.  Jonathan Lockwood Huie
• I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
• In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back. Peanuts character Charlie Brown
• We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. Albert Einstein
• Mystery

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Life is a book and you are the author who fills its pages

• And, always, remember, even when the memories pinch your heart. Because the pain of all your experience is what makes you the person you are now. And without your experience—you are an empty page, a blank notebook, a missing lyric. Alysha Speer
• Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them. Julien Green
• You can’t start the next chapter of your book if you keep re-reading the last one.
• We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” Edith Lovejoy Pierce
• No one else can speak the words on your lips. Drench yourself in words unspoken. Live your life with arms wide open. Today is where your book begins. The rest is still unwritten. Natasha Bedingfield
• Life is a book and you are its author. You determine its plot and pace and you—only you—turn its pages. Beth Mende Conny
• In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but Providence writes on the other side and what it contains is seldom our goal. Nisami
• Be the author of your life

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Each life is a book with its own meaning

• There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. Anaïs Nin
• The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you. Somerset Maugham
• Meaning

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The world is a book

• The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page. Saint Augustine

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Love and marriage is a book

• Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose. Beverly Nichols
• If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ve got to buy two separate books. Alan King

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Share your books with your friends …

• The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. Katherine Mansfield
• Friendship

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… but make sure you get them back !

• Nobody steals books but your friends. Roger Zelazny

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Study books but study nature too

• A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. Walt Whitman
• But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. P. Lovecraft
• Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can never learn from books. John Lubbock
• Study nature not books. Jean Louis Agassiz
• You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. Saint Bernard
• Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything – even mountains, rivers, plants and trees – should be your teacher. Morihei Ueshiba
• You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. Bernard
• If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature. John Burroughs
• Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education. David Polis
• Nature

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Keep a notebook with you always

• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever. Will Self
• Don’t forget to carry a notebook to record your ideas during the day. Charles Cave
• Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million- dollar ideas for yourself.  Bob Grinde
• It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. Ernest Hemingway

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Keep your memories in a scrapbook

• A picture is worth a thousand words, but a scrapbook page is worth a million memories. Remedios Lina C. Villarosa- Garcia
• A scrapbooker is a photographer with something better to do! Rebekah Day
• A true scrapbook addict is one who stages photographs to match paper she likes.
• And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, With the photographs there and the moths. Leonard Cohen
• We gather up pictures and bits of our past and scrapbook them into a gift that will last. Kimberly Rinehart
• There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook. David Benioff
• Scrapbooking isn’t about scraps of paper and photos. Scrapbooking is about scraps of life – yours and those special to you.  Rebecca Sower
• Time flies… scrapbook it. Vivian Perez-Espinosa
• A person is neither whole nor healthy without the memories of photo albums. They are the storybook of our lives.  They provide a nostalgic escape from the tormented days of the present. Patrick Garry

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The books we love reveal who we are

• Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. Weir Mitchell

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A book may lie dormant for many years

• A book is one of the most patient of all man’s inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well- made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world- changing, simple; and in a public library…without cost to the reader. Lawrence Clark Powell
• A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect, the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences. Marguerite Yourcenar
• Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning. Samuel Johnson

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Books turn up when we need them most

• I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. Emma Thompson
• Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. Alain de Botton
• I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books- whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. Cecelia Ahern

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A home isn’t a home without books

• A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• A house without books is like a room without windows. Horace Mann
• A room without books is like a body without a soul. Cicero
• Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Henry Ward Beecher
• Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. Anna Quindlen
• I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends… letting the world roll on as it likes, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give. Thomas Jefferson
• I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. Anna Quindlen
• The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs. Laura Hillenbrand
• May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true. Abraham Cowley
• No furniture is so charming as books. Sydney Smith
• Home

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Thoughts on digital books

• Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators. Stephen Fry

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Thoughts on books of quotations

• A book of quotations can never be complete. Robert M. Hamilton
• A book which hath been culled from the flowers of all books. George Eliot
• Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. Maturin M. Ballou
• Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I’ve compiled a book from the Internet. It’s a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people. Jerry Seinfeld
• The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you, close the book and meditate. Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne
• Quotologists encounter happy surprises, bright books by faded authors, treasures hidden under dust. Willis Goth Regier
• Quotations

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Thoughts on the burning of books

• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud
• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. Ray Bradbury

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Thoughts on books and stories

• Sometimes a book isn’t a heart-breaking work of staggering genius. Sometimes it’s the only story you knew how to tell.  Tahereh Mafi
• Stories never really end…even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page. Cornelia Funke

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Definitions

• A novel is a book that has a blonde on the jacket and no jacket on the blonde. Earl Wilson
• A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read. Mark Twain
• A biography is a book that is usually written about a dead person because it is so unlike him when he was alive. Evan Esar
• Book Jacket: A fable of contents.
• Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. Alan Bennett
• Intellectual: A guy who can keep his mind on a book at a beach.
• Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose. Beverly Nichols
• Novel: a book that has a blonde on the jacket and no jacket on the blonde.
• Preface: That part of a book which is never read.
• Research is reading two books that have never been read in order to write a third that will never be read. NASA Truism
• Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.  Ambrose Pierce
• Yearbook: A book of pictures that get nerdier with time.

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Books, sex and love

• If sex is such a natural phenomenon how come there are so many books on how to do it? Bette Midler
• A dirty book is rarely dusty.
• Everyone probably thinks that I’m a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I’d rather read a book. Madonna
• Hi, I’m writing a phone book, can I have your number?
• I don’ t know if you’ve read my book “Advanced Sexual Positions: How to Achieve Them Without Laughing. ” Woody Allen
• I honestly believe there is absolutely nothing like going to bed with a good book or a friend who’s read one. Oscar Levant
• I learned about sex the hard way – from books. Emo Phillips
• Men are like textbooks: you have to spend a lot of time between the covers to gain a small amount of satisfaction.
• My publishers are finally going to release my book about sex with clocks. It’s about fucking time.
• Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find. Patrick Rothfuss
• A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out. Doug Coupland
• Anyone who eats three meals a day should understand why cookbooks outsell sex books three to one. Boyd
• If you want to read about love and marriage you’ve got to buy two separate books. Alan King
• Men are just like a book – with a beginning, middle and an end. Pamela Anderson
• The trouble is by the time you can read a girl like a book, your library card has expired. Milton Berle
• The days just prior to marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book. Wilson Mizner
• What is the thinnest book in the world? “What Men Know About Women”

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Borrowing and lending books

• Never lend books for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me. Anatole France
• Most new books are forgotten within a year especially by those who borrow them. Evan Esar
• Nobody steals books but your friends. Roger Zelazny
• Everything comes to him who waits except a loaned book. Frank  …Kin’ Hubbard

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Writing books

• Politics is not a bad profession; if you succeed there are many rewards if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book. Ronald Reagan
• Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book and does. Groucho Marx
• Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. Christopher Hitchens
• Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. Truman Capote
• Doing a book signing tomorrow at Barnes & Noble. Bring your own book.  I haven’t written one yet.   Daniel Tosh
• I’m writing a book. I have all the page numbers down now I just have to fill in the rest. Steven Wright
• I’ve compiled a book from the Internet. It’s a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people. Jerry Seinfeld
• I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby. Evelyn Waugh
• I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow? Jarod Kintz
• I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book. Gloria Swanson
• 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
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. K. Chesterton
• No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book but many have tried while trying to write one. Ed Byrne
• One man is as good as another until he has written a book. Benjamin Jowett
• President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003.   Conan O’Brien
• The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes. Agatha Christie
• This is the sixth book I’ve written which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two. George Burns
• When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book. Mary Higgins Clark

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Reading books

• I do a lot of reading on serial killers – mostly How To books.   Roseanne Barr
• I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. Groucho Marx
• From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter; some day, I intend reading it. Groucho Marx
• Henry Kissinger may be a great writer but anyone finishes his book is definitely a great reader. Walter Isaacson
• I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I will know how it turned out. Nora Ephron
• I have only ever read one book in my life and that is White Fang; it’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another. Nancy Mitford
• I have only ever read one book in my life and that is White Fang; it’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another. Nancy Mitford
• I read the Book of Job last night; I don’t think God comes out of it well. Virginia Wolfe
• I’ve given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself. Oscar Levant
• I was reading a book “The History of Glue” – I couldn’t put it down. Tim Vine
• Be careful about reading health books for you may die of a misprint. Mark Twain
• Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun. Groucho Marx
• If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it. G. Wells
• If you were forced to read the book in high school you’ll probably hate the movie too. Wharton’s Law
• Outside a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. Groucho Marx
• Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start. John Green
• Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it. Moses Hadas

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Buying books

• I was going to buy a book on hair loss but the pages kept falling out. Jay London
• I was in a book store and saw a French looking girl. She was bi-illterate. She couldn’t read in two languages.   Steven Wright
• I was in a bookstore the other day and asked the woman behind the counter where the self-help section was; she said “If I told you that would defeat the whole purpose. ” Brian Kiley
• I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book. Groucho Marx
• I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. It’s impossible to put down.
• I bought a book for my girlfriend called cheap and easy cooking for vegetarians which is ideal for her because she is a vegetarian and …
• The book you spent $20.95 for today will come out in paperback tomorrow. Pantuso’s First Law

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Selling books

• Hemingway hated me; I sold 200 million books and he didn’t of course. Most of mine sold for 25 cents.   Mickey Spillane
• If a book about failures doesn’t sell is it a success? Jerry Seinfeld
• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. John le Carré
• If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. Demetri Martin
• It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. Stephen Hawking
• The first page sells that book; the last page sells your next book. Mickey Spillane
• The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell. Ninon de Lenclos

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Bad books

• It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead. Dame Rose Macaulay
• [about the dictionary] It’s the most pointless book since “How to Learn French was translated into French. Rowan Atkinson
• All books over five hundred pages that weren’t written by Dickens or a dead Russian are better left on the shelf. William E. Blundell
• It is part of prudence to thank an author for his book before reading it so as to avoid the necessity of lying about it afterwards. George Santayana
• Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it. Mark Twain
• Once you’ve put one of his books down you simply can’t pick it up again. Mark Twain
• The covers of this book are too far apart. Ambrose Bierce
• The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. Walter Bagehot
• There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. Charles Dickens
• This book fills a much-needed gap. Moses Hadas
• There is no thief like a bad book. Italian proverb
• When I can’t sleep I read a book by Steve Allen. Oscar Levant

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Good books

• It’s red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I’ve finished this, I shall recommend they ban it. Tony Hancock
• A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say ‘How to Build a Boat. Stephen Wright
• Whenever you read a good book it’s like the author is right there in the room talking to you which is why I don’t like to read good books. Jack Handey

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Books and God

• An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books. Samuel Butler
• The Bible if ya read it you’d know; it’s right in the beginning there in the Book of Generous. Archie Bunker
• The number one book of the ages was written by a committee and it was called the Bible. Louis B. Mayer
• She is so old, she’s in God’s year book.

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Cookbooks

• What the modern bride doesn’t know would fill a book–a cookbook. Evan Esar
• Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother’s. Andrei Codrescu
• The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books – how not to eat what you’ve just learned how to cook. Andy Rooney

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More light-hearted quotes

• A friend is like a book: you don’t need to read all of them, just pick the best ones.
• Americans like fat books and thin women. Russell Baker
• As soon as you dispose of a book, even one that has gathered dust for years, a pressing need to refer to it will arise. Rawson’s First Law
• Books are for people who don’t have ideas of their own. Greg Hahn
• Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators. Stephen Fry
• Cambridge is the kind of place where you can walk into a children’s bookstore and find a self-help section. Jonathan Katz
• Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read. Mitch Hedberg
• I think there is more wisdom in a single drop of rain than there is in all the books in all the libraries of the world; wait not rain – super-concentrated brain juice. Jack Handey
• If I had a baby I would have to name it so I’d buy a baby naming book or I would invite somebody over who had a cast on. Mitch Hedberg
• In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back. Charley Brown
• Inside every fat book there is a thin book trying to get out.
• My book club reads only wine labels.
• My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Fortunately, everybody drinks water. Mark Twain
• One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.” K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them. Georg C. Lichtenberg
• Robins: I’ve just written my 87th book. Barbara Cartland: I’ve written 145. Robins: Oh. I see one a year. Denise Robins
• So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall. Roald Dahl
• Somewhere an elderly lady reads a book on how to use the internet, while a young boy googles “how to read a book”.
• Sparky is the only guy I know who’s written more books than he has read. Ernie Harwell
• 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
• The dog ate my notebook with all my good excuses. Mindee Arnett
• The last chapter of every book should just be all the characters acting completely terrified because their world is about to end.
• The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. Mark Twain
• There’s a world that we know nothing about that we can only imagine and that is the world of books. Jack Handey
• Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either. Gore Vidal
• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud
• What you don’t know would make a good book. Reverend Sydney Smith
• Whenever I see an autobiography for sale in the book store I just flip to the about the author section. I’m like “Done next!   Demetri Martin
• You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. S. Lewis
• You can’t tell a book by its movie. Louis A. Safian
• You know you’re getting old when all the names in your black book have M.D. after them. Arnold Palmer
• You know you’re working class when your TV is bigger than your bookcase. Rob Beckett

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