A library implies an act of faith.
A library is but the soul's burying ground. It is a land of shadows.
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
A man's library is a sort of harem.
An hour spent in the library is worth a month in the laboratory.
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.
I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.
My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
My library was dukedom large enough.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Some on commission, some for the love of learning, some because they have nothing better to do or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears.
The great British Library –an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or ''pure English, undefiled'' wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.