If a man can purchase but very few books, my first advice to him would be, let him purchase the very best. If he cannot spend much, let him spend well. The best will always be the cheapest. Leave mere dilutions and attenuations to those who can afford such luxuries. Do not buy milk and water, but get condensed milk, and put what water you like to it yourself. This age is full of word-spinners -- professional book-makers, who hammer a grain of matter so thin that it will cover a five-acre sheet of paper: these men have their uses, as gold-beaters have, but they are of no use to you. -- Charles Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
A room without books is as a body without a soul. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626, Of Studies)
A book continues working when the meeting has ended. It accompanies the audience back to their homes. It goes on speaking to them. Literature is the second leg of Christian proclamation. -- Klaus Bockmuehl (Books: God's Tools in the History of Salvation <Vancouver, BC: Regent College and Helmers & Howard, 1986>, p. 26.)
In the past the pen has been the hammer to break the errors of centuries. But now the enemies of the truth have learned the value of books and with word processors and printing presses they have left those who love the biblical Christianity far behind . . . A minister can lead his people to see the importance of the use of good literature just as he leads them in other truths. -- Ernest Reisinger (Every Christian A Publisher, <Chapel Library, 1987>, p. 2)
Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom. -- George Curtis
The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, or defence. -- J. A. Langford, The Praise of Books (1880)
A good library should be looked upon as an indispensable part of church furniture; and the deacons, whose business it is "to serve tables," will be wise if, without neglecting the table of the Lord, or of the poor, and without diminishing the supplies of the minister's dinner-table, they give an eye to his study-table, aand keep it supplied with new works and standard books in fair abundance. It would be money well laid out, and would be productive far beyond expectation. -- Charles Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
. . . but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. -- John Milton (Aeropagitica, <Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corp., 1951>, p. 6)
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
Books . . . are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. -- Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), from The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (Rosalie Maggio, 1994)
When I have a little money, I buy books- if any is left, I buy food and clothes. -- Erasmus
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
. . . for Gresham Machen never went anywhere, it seemed, without having immediately at hand a large supply of reading matter, and even specified that his top coats should be tailored with spacious additional inside pockets for this purpose. -- Ned Stonehouse (J. Gresham Machen, <Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1987>, pp. 23-24)
The Scriptures are sufficient for their proper use, which is to be a law of faith and life, if they be understood. But, 1. They are not sufficient for that which they were never intended for: 2. And we may by other books be greatly helped in understanding them. 3. If other books were not needful, teachers were not needful; for writing is but the most advantageous way of teaching by fixed characters, which fly not from our memory as transient words do. And who is it that understandeth the Scriptures that never had a teacher? And why said the eunuch, "How should I (understand what I read) unless some man guide me?" Acts 8:31. And why did Christ set teachers in his church to the end, till it be perfected? Eph. 4:11-13, if they must not teach the church unto the end. Therefore they may write unto the end. -- Richard Baxter (A Christian Directory <Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990>, I, p. 731)
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. -- Logan Pearsall Smith
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. -- G. M. Trevelyan
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind. -- Jacques Barzun
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. -- Clifton Fadiman
I cannot live without books. -- Thomas Jefferson
Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare. -- Harriet Martineau
I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. -- Groucho Marx
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. -- William Hazlett
The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. -- Theodore Parker
A book is like a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. -- G. C. Lichtenberg
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. -- Henry David Thoreau
Many books require no thought from those who read them, for a very simple reason they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. -- Colton
In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case, it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market -- Anita Brookner
I don't do much book reviewing anymore. It interferes too much with my reading -- Dorothy Parker
Steele might become a reasonably good writer if he would pay a little more attention to grammar, learn something about the propriety and disposition of words and, incidentally, get some information on the subject he intends to handle -- Jonathon Swift
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. -- Edmund Burke
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored. -- Albert Einstein (Atlantic Monthly, November 1945)
The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all people. You need to read ... Paul cries, "Bring the books" -- join in the cry. -- C.H. Spurgeon (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 9, 1863, sermon #542, p. 668)
If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep. -- C.S. Lewis (The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, p. 249)
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. -- Joseph Addison
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. -- A. Bronson Alcott (Table Talk, 1877)
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. -- Joseph Brodsky (1991)
When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands. -- James Burke
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living. -- Tryon Edwards
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. -- Gilbert Highet
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Morituri Salutamus)
The best books ... are those that tell you what you know already. -- George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)
I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget. -- William Lyon Phelps
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. -- Enrique Jardiel Poncela
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
Books, the children of the brain. -- Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub, 1704)
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed. -- Sir William Temple (Miscellanea, 1690)
A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. -- Carl Van Doren (quoted by James Thurber in Bermudian, 1950)
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. -- Franklin P. Adams
Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. -- African Proverb
Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle. -- Robert Anthony Think (Think On and Think Again)
All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price. -- Juvenal
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. -- Socrates
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. -- Alvin Toffler
Augustine ... comments on the fact -- to him, apparently, remarkable -- that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. -- C.S. Lewis (The Allegory of Love, <Oxford University Press, 1936>, pp. 64-65)
Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. -- Francis Bacon (Essays)
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. -- Edward P. Morgan
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. -- James Bryce
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. -- Barbara Tuchman
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. -- Charles Lamb
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. -- E. M. Forster
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. -- Malcolm X
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. -- S. Weir Mitchell
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
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea. -- Lawrence Clark Powell (Books in my Baggage)
Wear the old coat and buy the new book. -- Austin Phelps
What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books. -- Thomas Carlyle
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 "Tremendous" Jones
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -- Ray Bradbury
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. -- Christopher Morley
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. -- Kafka
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. -- Samuel Johnson
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. -- Flannery O'Conner
The writer, making every effort to appear innocent and noble, takes his revenge with the pen; while the murderer, less hypocrtical, takes it with the sword. -- Christopher Spranger (The Effort to Fall)
If you read the 'Babylonian books' of the present day, you will catch their spirit, and it is a foreign one, which will draw you aside from the Lord your God. You may also get great harm from divines in whom there is much pretence of the Jerusalem dialect, but their speech is half of Ashdod: these will confuse your mind and defile your faith. It may happen that a book which is upon the whole excellent, which has little taint about it, may do you more mischief than a thoroughly bad one. Be careful; for works of this kind come forth from the press like clouds of locusts. Scarcely can you find in these days a book which is quite free from the modern leaven, and the least particle of it ferments until it produces the wildest error. In reading books of the new order, though no palpable falsehood may appear, you are conscious of a twist being given you, and of a sinking in the tone of your spirit; therefore be on your guard. -- Charles H. Spurgeon ("Babylonian Books")
A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book. -- Thomas Merton (concerning one of his own books!)
It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise and good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. -- Richard Baxter
It takes a determined effort of the mind to break free from the error of making books an end in themselves. The worst thing a book can do for a Christian is to leave him with the impression that he has received from it anything really good; the best it can do is to point the way to the Good he is seeking. The function of a good book is to stand like a signpost directing the reader toward the Truth and the Life. That book serves best which early makes itself unnecessary, just as a signpost serves best after it is forgotten, after the traveler has arrived safely at his desired haven. The work of a good book is to incite the reader to moral action, to turn his eves toward God and urge him forward. Beyond that it cannot go. -- A. W. Tozer (The Divine Conquest)
If thou wouldst profit by thy reading, read humbly, simply, honestly, and not desiring to win a character [i.e., reputation] for learning. -- Thomas à Kempis (Of the Imitation of Christ)
People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst. -- Ford Madox Ford
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions. -- Vaclav Havel
Literature is analysis after the event. -- Doris Lessing
The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms. -- Marques De Pombal
The best service a book, a sermon, or a lecture can render you is not merely to impart truth, but to make you think it out for yourself. -- A. P. Gouthey
The bestseller of one decade becomes the embarassment of another. The revolutionary theory which convulses the academic world gets cut down in the next age to an ironic footnote. -- Paul Johnson ("An Historian Looks at Jesus" in Crisis in Christology)
"The Bibliomaniac's Prayer" -- Keep me I pray, in wisdom's way, That I may truths eternal seek; I need protecting care today -- My purse is light, my flesh is weak. So banish from my erring heart All baleful appetites and hints Of Satan's fascinating art, Of first editions and of prints, Direct me in some goodly walk Which leads away from bookish strife, That I with pious deed and talk May extra-illustrate my life. But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee To keep me in temptation's way, I humbly ask that I may be Most notably beset today; Let my temptation be a book, Which I shall purchase, hold and keep, Whereon, when other men shall look, They'll wail to know I got it cheap. -- Eugene Field (1896)