Library - Quotes

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A good library is a great kingdom. - Magliabecchi

A good library is an anchor to keep a young man from roving, and a helm to aid an old man to gain the greatest possible benefit from what remains of the breeze. - William D’arcy Haley

A great library contains the diary of the human race. - George Dawson

A great public library, in its catalogue and its physical disposition of its books on shelves, is the monument of literary genres. - Robert Melancon

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look. - Pat Conroy

A library is a precious catacomb, wherein are embalmed and preserved imperishably the great minds of the dead who will never die. - Chatfield

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded. - Daniel Handler

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life. - Norm Cousins

A library is the door to many lives. - Sharon Creech

A library is the easiest place to mislay a book, and the worst place to try to find it again. - Tim Severin

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants. - Doris Lessing

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. - Jo Godwin

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library; a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is where people, one frequently finds, lower their voice and raise their minds. - Richard Armour

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. - Saul Bellow

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple. - Jean-Paul Sartre

I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows. - Roger Zelazny

I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me – nature's not what I cling to. I cling to books. - Emily Wing Smith

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. - Alberto Manguel

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. - Cicero

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. - Anne Fadiman

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. - Elizabeth Kostova

Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally. - Neil Gaiman

Libraries are the wardrobes of our literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. - George Dyer

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge. - Patrick Ness

Libraries can be an indispensable service in lifting the dead weight of poverty and ignorance. - Francis Keppel

Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age. - George Bancroft

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

Libraries were full of ideas – perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons. - Sarah J. Maas

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. - Anne Herbert

Living in a library is the realization of liberal education, the feverish road to getting more from college than a degree. - Douglas M. Stehle

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. - Virginia Woolf

My library is a friend of a thousand years. - Kyo-Sya

My library is an archive of longings. - Susan Sontag

My library is my garden and my orchard. - Judah Ha-Levi

My library was dukedom large enough. - William Shakespeare

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. - Peter Golkin

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. - Walter Savage Landor

Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers. - Diana Gabaldon

Shelved around us lie the mummied authors. - Bayard Taylor

Th' first thing to have in a lib'ry is a shelf. Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with literature. But th' shelf is th' main thing. - Finley Peter Dunne

That place that does contain my books, the best companions, is to me a glorious court, where hourly I converse with the old sages and philosophers. - Beaumont & Fletcher

The function of a great library is to store obscure books. - Nicholson Baker

The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-travelling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor: the ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise; odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold. - Robert Eldridge Aris Willmott

The main function of a library is the collection and preservation of knowledge for its dissemination to all. - R. S. Khochar

The Web is cool, but the library is magic. Where else can the spirit of generations of writers stir your soul? So many writers talk about libraries setting them on their magical paths, it's almost a groaner. But we know it's true. Wander through the stacks and you can feel the dreams, the unique worlds bubbling within each volume. The magic enters you as if by osmosis. On the Web, you may feel clever, lucky and driven to download – but rarely inspired to dream and to write. - Arthur Plotnik

These libraries should be open to all – except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. - Jon F. Kennedy

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. - Neil Gaiman

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

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. - Walter Cronkite

When in doubt, go to the library. - J. K. Rowling

Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race. - Christian Nestell Bovee