quotes on books

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. ~Francis Bacon


Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ~Walter Pater

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication. ~Logan Pearsall Smith

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. ~William Ewart Gladstone

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ~James Bryce

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~P.J. O'Rourke

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Groucho Marx

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~Mark Twain, attributed


A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

“Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading” C.S Lewis