Books - Quotes

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

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

A book is a gift you can open again and again. - Garrison Keillor

A book is like a garden carried in a pocket. - Chinese Proverb

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

A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you. - Louis L'Amour

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. - Charles Lamb

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. - J. M. Coetzee

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. - Madeleine L’Engle

A book worth reading is worth buying. - John Ruskin

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner, as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot. -Alan Bennett

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books – storms, fogs, and zephyrs. Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you have finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stands there as a badge, a monument. The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait. - Unknown

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. - Martin Farquhar Tupper

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. - John Milton

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. - Thomas Carlyle

A good book praises itself. - German Proverb

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

A good book, in the language of the booksellers, is a saleable one; in the language of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructful one.- Eliza Cook

A home without books is a body without soul. To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul. - Cicero

A house without books is like a room without windows. - Horace Mann

A library is a repository of medicine for the mind. - Greek Proverb

A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him. - Walter Mosley

A man is known by the books he reads. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age. - Robertson Davies

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. - Ernest Hemingway

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. - Unknown

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. - E.M.Forster

Beware of the man of one book. - Saint Thomas Aquinas

Book are a uniquely portable magic. - Stephen King

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style. - Jonathan Raban

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person. - Chanakya

Books are embalmed minds. They make the great of other days our present teachers. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life. - Christopher Paolini

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. - James Russell Lowell

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. - Barbara Tuchman

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 Addidson

Books are the liberated spirits of men. - Mark Twain

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books are the mirrors of the soul. - Virginia Woolfe

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. - Henry Ward Beecher

Books are hindrances to persisting stupidity. - Spanish Proverb

Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. - Alan Bennett

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back. - John Steinbeck

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman. - Louis L'Amour

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. - Anna Quindlen

Books are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions by night, in traveling, in the country. - Cicero

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party. - Louis L'Amour

Books are the training weights of the mind. - Epictetus

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. - Charles W. Eliot

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes. - Edward Gibbon

Books come at my call and return when I desire them; they are never out of humour and they answer all my questions with readiness. Some present in review before me the events of past ages; others reveal to me the secrets of Nature. These teach me how to live, and those how to die; these dispel my melancholy by their mirth, and amuse me by their sallies of wit. Some prepare my soul to suffer everything, to desire nothing, and to become thoroughly acquainted with itself. In a word, they open the door to all the arts and sciences. - Petrarca Petrarch

Books have to be read. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. - E.M.Forster

Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can. - William Feather

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

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

Books worth reading once are worth reading twice; and what is most important of all, the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times. - Unknown

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us – never cease to instruct – never cloy. - Charles Colton 

Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds – the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us. - E. H. Chapin 

Do not judge a book by its cover. - Unknown

Do you wish to learn? There are books that can teach you anything, and there is no cheaper form of education, nor one whose effects are more lasting. My education came from books, and they have been my companions by many campfires, in bunkhouses, ships, in hotels and on planes. No matter where you find me, I am never far from a book. - Louis L'Amour

Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books. - Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality. - Jorge Luis Borges

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

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator’s cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death. - Ivan Klima 

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book. - Arthur Helps

Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later – no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget – we will return. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives. - Amy Lowell

For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside. - Lin Yutang

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in all periods of time. - Louis L'Amour

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. - Anne Lamott

Give a man a book he can read, And his home is bright with a calm delight, Though the room be poor indeed. - Alfred Dunhill

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed. - Anne Rice

Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life. - Horace Mann

He who possesses good books without gaining any profit from them, is like an ass that carries a rich burden and feeds upon thistles. - John Thorton

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings! - Edgar Allan Poe

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.  - Umberto Eco

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have. - Doris Lessing

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. - C. S. Lewis

I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all. - Jose Saramago

I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both. - Elie Wiesel

I lived in books more than I live anywhere else. - Neil Gaiman

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books. - Louisa May Alcott

If books are not good company, where will I find it? - Mark Twain

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 Hazlitt

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. - Haruki Murakami

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely. - Arthur Helps

In a good book room you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them. - Mark Twain

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius. - Thomas Mann

In perusing the writings of sensible men, we have frequent opportunities of examining our own hearts, and by that means, of attaining a more certain knowledge of ourselves. - Wellins Calcott

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own. - Edgar Allan Poe

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you. - Mortimer Jerome Adler

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have. - Seneca

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. - Eudora Welty

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. - William Ellery Channing

It is only a novel ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. - Jane Austen 

It is so very easy and so very pleasant, too, to read only books which lead to nothing, light and interesting books, and the more the better, that it is almost as difficult to wean ourselves from it as from the habit of chewing tobacco to excess, or of smoking the whole time, or of depending for stimulus upon tea or coffee or spirits. - Charles Francis Adams

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is. - James Russell Lowell

It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first, we are highly delighted, if we find a general agreement – we are pleasantly moved on any of the chief sides of our existence. With a closer acquaintance differences come to light; and then reasonable conduct mainly consists in not shrinking back at once, as may happen in youth, but in keeping firm hold of the things in which we agree, and being quite clear about the things in which we differ, without on that account desiring any union. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit in selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts. - Jo Walton

Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about. - Adam Rapp

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason – they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. - Charles Colton

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total. - Forsyth and Rada

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. - Ezra Pound

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of the road, or requited love. - Tracy Letts

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books. - Charles Colton 

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books. - Romain Rolland

No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot. - Charles Dickens

No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture. - Madame Swetchne

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable. - Anthony Trollope

Of all things, I like books best. - Nikola Tesla

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading. - Amos Bronson Alcott

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. - E.M.Forster

One must always be careful of books ... and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us. - Cassandra Clare

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining. - Garrison Keillor

One who believes all of a book would be better off without books. - Mencius

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books. - Graham Greene

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read. - Doris Lessing

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. - Henry David Thoreau

Reading useless books is like sowing bad seed – your trouble does not reward you. - Edward Counsel

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. - Virginia Woolf

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. - W.H. Auden

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, 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

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 that book. - John Green

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit. - Amos Bronson Alcott

The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere. - Orison Swett Marden

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it. - Coventry Patmore

The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book. - Ursula K. Le Guin

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice versa. - Doris Dressing

The book you don’t read won’t help. - Jim Rohn

The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections. - Amos Bronson Alcott

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

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

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding – which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together – blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labour that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author. - Daniel Handler

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. - George Gissing

The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. - Robertson Davies

The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness. A good book often serves as a match to light the dormant power within us. - Orison Swett Marden

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

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

The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times. - Amos Bronson Alcott

The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. - Francis Bacon

The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals. - Orison Swett Marden

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions. - John Dawkins

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before. - Chamfort

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 got ourselves. - E.M.Forster

The only power source a book needs is you. If you have to leave for a few minutes you have not lost the story. It is waiting for you when you return. You can pick up a book and resume reading at any time, after a few minutes, a few days, even a few years. A television picture or a movie might be lost forever, but your book is waiting. - Louis L'Amour

The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture. - Henry Ward Beecher

The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment – for the remedying of social ills. - Jane Addams

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. Public knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown. - George Henry Lewes

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies. - Andre Maurois

The sight of books removes sorrows from the heart. - Moroccan Proverb

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. - G. K. Chesterton

The stitch of a book is its words. - Rumer Godden

The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing. - Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I haven’t read. - Abraham Lincoln

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. - James Bryce 

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. - Charles Dickens

There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different. - Daniel Handler

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. - Jeffrey Eugenides

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. - Walt Disney 

There is no book so bad that it is not profitable in some part. - Pliny the Younger 

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love. - Christopher Morley

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. - May Ellen Chase

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. - Oscar Wilde

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

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. - Gilbert Highet

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

To buy books as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor. - Alexander Pope

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things. - Lawrence Clark Powell

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone’s hands can change a life. I want to thank you because it did. - Kate DiCamilo

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. - John Lubbock

We should use a book as a bee does a flower. - Eliza Cook 

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. - Austin Phelps

What could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?... You forget everything ... and hours go by. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing. - Gustave Flaubert

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul. - Neil Gaiman

What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public. - Chamfort 

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman. - Jean De La Bruyere

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. - Julian Barnes

When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners? - Elif Batuman 

You cannot open a book without learning something. - Confucius

You can't tell a book by its cover. - American Proverb

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. - Mahatma Gandhi

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

Your library is your portrait. - Holbrook Jackson