quotations about books
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
The Haunted Bookshop
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, Nov. 23, 2003
It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first we are highly delighted, if we find a general agreement--if 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
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," , On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
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
Architects of Fate
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
Table Talk
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 (as Lemony Snicket)
Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Norwegian Wood
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
Between Tears and Laughter
If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Studies,", Essays
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
The Paris Review, summer 2008
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
GEORGE ORWELL
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
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
Table Talk
Pindar and Sophocles--as we all so glibly, and often with so little discernment of the real import of what we are saying--had not many books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise--in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Essays
I think the thing about reading is to read a lot, so you open lots of different views on the world. I'd much rather they read six random books than just one brilliant one. And what you get out of a book as an adult isn't what you'd get out of it when you're fifteen and encountering ideas for the first time and they can blow your head off. Whenever I think of narrowing it down to just one I can't bear to exclude the others.
JO WALTON
interview, RT Book Reviews