Book-related Quotes

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)

If the reader find pleasure, let him continue. If not, let him throw the book away. The only criterion in the end is pleasure; all the other arguments are worthless (Claude Simon)

A book that is shut is but a block (Thomas Fuller)

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate (Henry Miller)

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all (Oscar Wilde)

Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore? (Henry Ward Beecher)

The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed (Mark Van Doren)

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad (George Bernard Shaw)

A room without books is like a body without a soul (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

Books have to be read, it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West (E. M. Forster)

A novel is a garden carried in the pocket (Arabian proverb)

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul (Franz Kafka)

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it (William Styron)

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that cannot read them (Mark Twain)

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library (Jorge Luis Borges)

This page last updated April 26, 2004