Bookish Quotes

Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.

- A. Whitney Brown

Good prose is like a windowpane.

- George Orwell

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

- Saint Augustine

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

- E. M. Forster

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

- Bryce Courtenay

Reading is not walking on words, but grasping the soul of them.

- Paulo Freire

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

- Donald Hall

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

- Samuel Johnson

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

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

- Terry Pratchett

The perils of ambulatory reading. If you have never said Excuse me to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.

- Sherri Chasin Calvo

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.

- John Milton

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

- Stephen King

I love to read. My education is self-inflicted

- Groucho Marx

Books may well be the only true magic.

- Alice Hoffman

Books to the ceiling
Books to the sky.
My piles of books
Are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard
By the time I read them.

- Arnold Lobel

A man is known by the books he reads

- Ralph Waldo Emerson