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.
Henry David Thoreau – Book, Teaching
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau – Book, Reading
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau – Book, Wealth
A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
