To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
Arthur Schopenhauer | Book, Reading
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Tom Wolfe | Writing, Book
The Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the next. Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.
John Jay Chapman | The Bible
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler – The oldest books
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler – Books
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
Samuel Butler – Writing books
Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.
Michel de Montaigne – abridgement of a good book
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk — they are all part of the curriculum.
Michel de Montaigne – Education, Book
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
Nicolas Chamfort – Books
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
George Eliot – Story, Book, Reading
It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
Voltaire – Book
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Voltaire – Book
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
Voltaire – Book
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau – Books, Civilization
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.
