Quotes about Libraries

That's the thing about some librarians - they love telling you a look is out of print, borrowed, lost, or not even written yet.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading whenever I choose,
Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I am myself good fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticism,
Strong & Content I travel The Open Road.

    The library is not a shrine for the worship of books.  It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual.  A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. 

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that, as through life and to death he firmly did.

For twenty pages perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshiping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.

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.

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

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

I'm spending more time at this library in four days than I did at the Eureka College Library in four years. Ronald Reagan during the opening ceremonies for the library that will house his white house papers.

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

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.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

Imagine of all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stonewashed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on library shelves. And-since women are a majority of the population-we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life.

Suppose . . . burglars had made entry into this . . . [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.

My Alma mater was books, a good library . . . . I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

When Emerson's library was burning at Concord, I went to him as he stood with the firelight on his strong, sweet face, and endeavored to express my sympathy for the loss of his most valued possessions, but he answered cheerily, 'Never mind, Louisa, see what a beautiful blaze they make! We will enjoy that now.' The lesson was one never forgotten and in the varied lessons that have come to me I have learned to look for something beautiful and bright.

Oh, I get lucky a lot. I get lucky at four in the morning in the law library.

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library.

Josiah Quincy, one-time mayor of Boston and president of Harvard University, recalled: "I will repeat an anecdote which I think Daniel Webster gave at a dinner, though, as I made no note of it, it is just possible that he told it in my presence at some later date. The conversation was running upon the importance of doing small things thoroughly and with the full measure of one's ability. This Webster illustrated by an account of some petty insurance case that was brought to him when a young lawyer in Portsmouth. Only a small amount was involved, and a twenty-dollar fee was all that was promised. "He saw that, to do his clients full justice, a journey to Boston, to consult the law library, would be desirable. He would be out of pocket by such an expedition, and for his time he would receive no adequate compensation. After a little hesitation he determined to do his very best, cost cost what it might. He accordingly went to Boston looked up the authorities, and gained the case. "Years after this, Webster, then famous, was passing through New York City. An important insurance case was to be tried the day after his arrival, and one of the counsel had been suddenly taken ill. Money was no object, and Webster was begged to name his terms and conduct the case. " 'I told them,' Mr. Webster, 'that it was preposterous to prepare a legal argument at a few hours' notice. They insisted, however, that I should look at the papers; and this after some demur, I consented to do. Well, it was my old twenty-dollar case over again, and as I never forget anything, I had all the authorities at my fingers' ends. The Court knew that I had no time to prepare, and was astonished at the range of my acquirements. So, you see, I was handsomely paid both in fame and money for that journey to Boston; and the moral is that good work is rewarded in the end, though, to be sure, one's self-approval should be enough.'"

I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about being a man. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we will have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and apprehension.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? [cars?]

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God emploies several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

About Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.

Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.