476 Quotes About Libraries

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.

Having come to the conclusion that there was so much to do that she didn’t know where to start, Mrs Fowler decided not to start at all. She went to the library, took Diary of a Nobody from the shelves and, returning to her wicker chair under the lime tree, settled down to waste what precious hours still remained of the day.

Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven't: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven't read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.

The library at Madingley Grange was rarely used. The pristine books in their diamond-paned cases seemed never to have been sullied by anything so coarse as the perusal of the human eye.

Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be. That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

Mr. Collins was to attend them, at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself

The library knows it’s own mind. When it steals a boy, we let it keep it.

The library knows its own mind. When it steals a boy, we let it keep it.

Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.