"Life being very short, and the quiet hours few,

we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books."

—John Ruskin

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."

—St. Augustine

"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

"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit,

embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

—John Milton

"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been:

it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."

—Thomas Carlyle

"In the best books, great men talk to us,
give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
God be thanked for books.
They are the voices of the distant and the dead,
and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them,
the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest."

—William Ellery Channing

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

—Franz Kafka

"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

"The theory of books is noble.
The scholar of the first age
received into him the world around; brooded thereon;
gave it the new arrangement of his own mind,
and uttered it again. It came into him, life;
it went out from him, truth."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Books—the best antidote against the marsh-gas

of boredom and vacuity."

—George Steiner

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles

the vision and stengthens our most fatal tendency—

the belief that the here and now is all there is."

—Allan Bloom

"No man can be called friendless

who has God and the companionship of good books."

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here or there on a tree
which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life,
of our first experiences. But . . . to tell the reader anything
that his own imagination and insight have not already discovered
would need not a page or two of preface but a volume or two of autobiography."

—Virginia Woolf

"Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action
the wisdom we get from thought—asleep. When we are weary
of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing
of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."

—W. B. Yeats