30 quotes about Libraries
Click here to search the web for Libraries



There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Adams, J. Donald quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Ball, Hugo quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

A library is but the soul's burying ground. It is a land of shadows.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Beecher, Henry Ward quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Birrell, Augustine quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Carlyle, Thomas quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Cousins, Norman quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

A man's library is a sort of harem.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Your library is your paradise.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Erasmus, Desiderius quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Greer, Germaine quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

A library implies an act of faith.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Hugo, Victor quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

The great British Library --an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Irving, Washington quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Johnson, Samuel quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Lichtenberg, Georg C. quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

What is more important in a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Macleish, Archibald quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Some on commission, some for the love of learning, some because they have nothing better to do or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Macneice, Louis quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Malcolm X quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want is always out.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Masson, Thomas L. quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

The quantity of books in a person's library, is often a cloud of witnesses to the ignorance of the owner.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Oxenstierna, Count Axel Gustafsson quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Rowan, Carl quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Ruskin, John quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

My library was dukedom large enough.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Shakespeare, William quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Sheridan, Richard Brinsley quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Smith, Alexander quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Tuchman, Barbara quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Unknown, Source quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

An hour spent in the library is worth a month in the laboratory.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Unknown, Source quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.
Email this quotation to a friend     View quote | Whittier, John Greenleaf quotes
      Related items on Amazon USABooks from this quotation author on Amazon US or UKBooks from this quote author on Amazon UK