Library / Book Collection Quotes

The true university these days is a collection of books.
- Thomas Carlyle

Make thy books thy companions. Let thy cases and shelves be thy pleasure grounds and gardens.
- Judah ibn-Tibbon (12th century)

To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.
- Cicero

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
- Bacon

Give thy mind to books and libraries, and the literature and lore of the ages will give thee the wisdom of sage and seer.
- Newell D. Hillis

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
- Alexander Smith

A library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it.
- Richard de Bury

It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.
- Owen Meredith, from Inspirational Quotes About Libraries, Librarians and Book Collections

The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can carry beyond the grave is wisdom.
- J. A. Langford

No furniture so charming as books.
- Sydney Smith

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
- Lady Bird Johnson

And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.
- Thomas Jefferson

A library is thought in cold storage.
- Herbert Samuel

Libraries are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
- Augustine Birrell

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
- Barbara Tuchman

Your library is your portrait.
- Holbrook Jackson

They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.
- William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!
- Richard Brainsley Sheridan

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
- Samuel Johnson

I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all of the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.
- Luigi Barzini

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
- Virginia Woolf

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?
- James Boswell

The dissemination of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of civilization.
- John F. Budd

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.
- Augustine Birrell

What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.
- John Bright

Come, and take choice of all my library,
And so beguile thy sorrow.
- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick

It is impossible to enter a large library... without feeling an inward sensation of reverence, and without catching some sparks of noble emulation, from the mass of mind which is scattered around you.
- James Crossley