You've probably noticed that towards the top of each page (including this one) there is a random, book-related quotation that refreshes every time the page is visited or refreshed. For your convenience and amusement, a complete list of these quotations is shown here. We would be pleased to hear from you if you have any quotes you think are worth including, or if you think that any of our attributions are incorrect.Learn as much by writing as by reading ...... Lord Acton.
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you ...... Mortimer Adler.
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life ...... Mortimer Adler.
If you cannot annoy somebody there is little point in writing ...... Kingsley Amis.
He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is a bigger idiot ...... Arabic Proverb.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered ...... W.H. Auden.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading ...... Jane Austen.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested ...... Francis Bacon.
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house ...... Henry Ward Beecher.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? ...... Henry Ward Beecher.
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life ...... Henry Ward Beecher.
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read ...... Belloc.
The covers of this book are too far apart ...... Ambrose Bierce.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you ...... Harold Bloom.
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you ...... Daniel Boorstein.
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library ...... Jorge Luis Borges.
You do not have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them ...... Ray Bradbury.
The closest thing we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library ...... Ashleigh Brilliant.
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books ...... Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it ...... James Bryce.
You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books ...... Carter Burden.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who do not read the books ...... A.S. Byatt.
What we become depends on what we read after the professors have finished with us. The greatest university is a collection of books ...... Carlyle.
What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations ...... Lewis Carroll.
To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend; to read it a second time is to meet an old one ...... Selwyn Champion.
In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns ...... Raymond Chandler.
In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thought, and pour their souls into ours ...... William Ellery Channing.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author ...... G. K. Chesterton.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read ...... G.K. Chesterton.
A book holds a house of gold ...... Chinese Proverb.
A book tightly shut is but a block of paper ...... Chinese Proverb.
The public library is the most dangerous place in town ...... John Ciardi.
A room without books is like a body without a soul ...... Cicero.
Many books require no thought from those who read them, for they made no such demand upon those who wrote them ...... Charles Caleb Colton.
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser ...... Robertson Davies.
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts ...... Charles Dickens.
There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away ...... Emily Dickinson.
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own ...... Conan Doyle.
Never judge a book by its movie ...... J. W. Eagan.
Do not be afraid to go in your library and read every book ...... Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, the wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers ...... Charles Eliot.
In the highest civilization, the book is the highest delight. He who has known its satisfactions has a resource against calamity ...... Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free ...... Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food ...... Erasmus.
Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them ...... Evan Esar.
I have been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library ...... F. Scott Fitzgerald.
If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are the banks ...... Wendell Ford.
I would not exchange my early and invincible love of reading for all the treasures of India ...... Edward Gibbon.
I read part of it all the way through ...... Samuel Goldwyn.
Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself ...... Maxim Gorky.
Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred ...... Gunther Grass.
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I will waste no time reading it ...... Moses Hadas.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites ...... Elizabeth Hardwick.
When books are opened you discover you have wings ...... Helen Hayes.
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings ...... Heinrich Heine.
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought ...... Sir Arthur Helps.
What in the world would we do without our libraries? ...... Katharine Hepburn.
Woe be to him that reads but one book ...... George Herbert.
Do give books for Christmas. They are never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal ...... Lenore Hershey.
This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop ...... Alfred Hitchcock.
Books may well be the only true magic ...... Alice Hoffman.
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books ...... Bell Hooks.
The proper study of mankind is books ...... Aldous Huxley.
Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever ...... Holbrook Jackson.
The only obligation to which we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting ...... Henry James.
I cannot live without books ...... Thomas Jefferson.
James, why do not you write books that people can read? ...... Nora Joyce.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us ...... Franz Kafka.
You can cover a great deal of country in books ...... Andrew Lang.
A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can not expect an apostle to peer out ...... Lichtenberg.
It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a pious thing to collect them ...... F.Locker-Lampson.
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead ...... Dame Rose Macaulay.
A house without books is like a room without windows ...... Horace Mann.
No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them ...... Horace Mann.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence ...... Horace Mann.
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books ...... Katherine Mansfield.
I find television very educational. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book ...... Groucho Marx.
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it ...... Groucho Marx.
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all ...... Somerset Maugham.
Hold a book in your hand and you are a pilgrim at the gates of a new city ...... Anne Michaels.
A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you ...... Henry Miller.
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition ...... Henry Miller.
Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum ...... Henry Miller.
When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold ...... Henry Miller.
He who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself ...... Milton.
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting ...... Lady Montagu.
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books ...... Michel de Montaigne.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love ...... Christopher Morley.
If there is a book that you want to read but that has not been written yet then you must write it ...... Toni Morrison.
A second-hand bookshop is the sign of a civilized community ...... Walter Murdoch.
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier ...... Kathleen Norris.
Every book is a failure ...... George Orwell.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force ...... Dorothy Parker.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book ...... Austin Phelps.
I would be the most content if my children grew up to think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves ...... Anna Quindlen.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return ...... Salman Rushdie.
A book worth reading is worth buying ...... John Ruskin.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time ...... John Ruskin.
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it ...... Bertrand Russell.
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person ... perhaps dead for 1000 years. To read is to voyage through time ...... Carl Sagan.
Books are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind ...... Schopenhauer.
Books are humanity in print ...... Schopenhauer.
Without books the development of civilisation would have been impossible ...... Schopenhauer.
Concerning no subject would Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion ...... Roger Scruton.
When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it ...... Marie de Sevigne.
Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous ...... George Bernard Shaw.
Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty ...... George Bernard Shaw.
A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge ...... Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
I have never known any trouble that an hour of reading did not assuage ...... Charles de Secondat.
I enjoyed talking to Virginia Woolf but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her a beautiful little knitter ...... Edith Sitwell.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading ...... Logan Pearsall Smith.
Books are hindrances to stupidity ...... Spanish Proverb.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body ...... Sir Richard Steele.
I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading ...... Henry Strauss.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book ...... Henry David Thoreau.
Books are the carriers of civilization ...... Henry David Thoreau.
Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you will not come out for twenty years ...... Leo Tolstoy.
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill ...... Barbara Tuchman.
A classic is a book that people praise but do not read ...... Mark Twain.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them ...... Mark Twain.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint ...... Mark Twain.
Just the omission of Jane Austen books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that had not a book in it ...... Mark Twain.
A good book is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend ...... Unknown.
Every man must die sooner or later, but good books must be preserved ...... Don Vincente.
The multitude of books is making us ignorant ...... Voltaire.
One could always baffle Conrad by saying humour ...... H.G. Wells.
I have given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself ...... Oscar Wilde.
It is what you read when you do not have to that determines what you will be when you cannot help it ...... Oscar Wilde.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written ...... Oscar Wilde.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read ...... Oscar Wilde.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you - such is a pleasure beyond compare ...... Kenko Yoshida.
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy ...... Frank Zappa.