Inspirational Quotes on Books

“Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.”

“If all the crowns of Europe were placed at my disposal on condition that I should abandon my books and studies, I should spurn the crowns away and stand by the books.”

“If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.”

“How different is the poet from the mystic. The former uses symbols, knowing they are symbols; the latter mistakes them for realities.”

“Multifarious reading weakens the mind more than doing nothing, for it becomes a necessity, at last, like smoking: and is an excuse for the mind to lie dormant whilst thought is poured in, and runs through, a clear stream over unproductive gravel, on which not even mosses grow. It is the idlest of all idleness, and leaves more of impotency than any other.”

“I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, and never turning aside to merely inviting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Jonathan Edwards, have passed, like the iron atoms of the blood, into my mental constitution.”

“It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth.”

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

“As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other, you will find what is needful for you in a book.”

“They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.”

“The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that aliment, whose property is to feed it.”

“Many works of fiction may be read with safety; some even with profit; but the constant familiarity, even with such as are not exceptionable in themselves, relaxes the mind, which needs hardening; dissolves the heart, which wants fortifying; stirs the imagination, which wants quieting; irritates the passions, which want calming; and, above all, disinclines and disqualifies for active virtues and for spiritual exercises.”

“I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”

“It is well to remember that reading books about the Bible is a very different thing to searching the Word for oneself.”

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”

“A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.”