Books Quotes

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

First publication is a pure carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

~ Hortense Calisher

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is there reading makes it more.

~ John Harington

A good book has no ending.

~ R. D. Dimming

I hate books they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

In the case of good books the point is not to see how many of them you can get through but rather how many can get through to you.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Books think for me.

~ Charles Lamb

Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none at all and even the best cannot be expected to run quite true.

~ Samuel Johnson

Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all.

~ William Dean Howells

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

~ Thomas Carlyle

I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.

~ Samuel Butler

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

~ Benjamin Jowett

If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.

~ John Ruskin

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

~ Arthur Helps

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

~ Samuel Butler

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it you can't expect an apostle to look out.

~ G. C. Lichtenberg

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

~ Mark Twain

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

~ Henry Ward Beecher

Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read. I have been eighty years at it and have not reached my goal.

~ Goethe

I am a part of all I have read.

~ John Kieran

Reading is the work of the alert mind is demanding and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

~ E. B. White

I do not know any reading more easy more fascinating more delightful than a catalogue.

~ Anatole France

To me the charm of an encyclopedia is that it knows - and I needn't.

~ Francis Yeats-Brown

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

A good title is the title of a successful book.

~ Raymond Chandler

Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.

~ Samuel Butler

Reading like prayer remains one of our few private acts.

~ William Jovanovich

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time with my eyes hanging out.

~ Dylan Thomas

A publisher is somebody looking for someone who has something to say.

~ Lome Pierce

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.

~ Marcel Proust

Some books are to be tasted others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.

~ Francis Bacon

If you would understand your own age read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

~ Arthur Helps

Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.

~ Walt Whitman

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

~ Chinese Proverb

The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

~ Ross Macdonald

There are still a few of us booklovers around despite the awful warnings of Marshall McLuhan with his TV era and his pending farewell to Gutenberg.

~ Frank Davies

Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.

~ Jean-Claude Carrière

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

~ Alan Ryan