“There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.”
“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”
“One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.”
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”
“Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.”
“Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.”
“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
“Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”
“You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”
“How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?”
“I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.”
“The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.”
“One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.”
“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.”
“In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.”
“The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.”
“There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”
“Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.”
“I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.”
“Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.”
“He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.”
“Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.”
“It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.”
“A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.”
“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
“The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.”
“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”