Quotes on Book

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book.

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.

One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.

I wanted to be of service to the Peace League, and how could I better do so than by trying to write a book which should propagate its ideas? And I could do it most effectively, I thought, in the form of a story.

I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month, than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men.

I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

In regards to this great Book [the Bible], I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

I'm going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I'm handing a book to - or I'm not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you're out. You have no control over it.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.