“Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.”
Jeremy Collier

“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”
William Ewart Gladstone

“The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.”
Hamilton Wright Mabie

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870

“A blessed companion is a book, – a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend,… a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.”
Douglas Jerrold

“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

“Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.”
Henry David Thoreau

“Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.”
Plato

“To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.”
Chinese Saying

“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

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Francis Bacon

“Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.”
George Steiner

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors.”
Henry Ward Beecher

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
Mark Twain

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
Abraham Lincoln

“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
Oscar Wilde

“A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read.”
Mark Twain

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book… ”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
Leo Tolstoy