"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty."
— Andrew Wolfe

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
— Charles W. Eliot

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
— Horace Mann

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."
— Abraham Lincoln

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."
— Walt Disney Company

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

"My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
— Malcolm X

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

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
— Jessamyn West

"I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room."
— Steven Wright

"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. --Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the inheritance of generations and nations."
— Henry David Thoreau

"He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot."
— Arabic proverb

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."
— Hermann Hesse

"The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"No furniture is so charming as books."
— Sydney Smith

"What refuge is there for the victim who is possessed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to read a hundred?"
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."
— John Berger (Keeping a Rendezvous)

"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 strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is."
— Allan Bloom

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."
— W.H. Auden

"…only then did I wake out of the book."
— John McGahern

"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight"
— Ezra Pound

"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
— Ezra Pound

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose."
— Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."
— A.C. Grayling (The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century)

"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."
— Isaac Asimov

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."
— Nicholas Tucker (Philip Pullman: Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman)