Quotes on Old Books

Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.

OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an "old man". Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an "old" book.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island...

Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!