My library was dukedom large enough. [ William Shakespeare ]
Libraries are the wardrobes of literature. [ James Dyer ]
As great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs or more. [ Henry Vaughan ]
Shelved around us lie the mummied authors. [ Bayard Taylor ]
The richest minds need not large libraries. [ Alcott ]
All round the room my silent servants wait,
My friends in every season, bright and dim. [ Barry Cornwall ]
I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,
If one be better with them or without -
Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,
Knows the high art of what and how to read. [ J. G. Saxe ]
That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]
The great consulting-room of a wise man is a library. [ George Dawson ]
A great library contains the diary of the human race. [ George Dawson ]
Errors belong to libraries; truth, to the human mind. [ Goethe ]
The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. [ Willmott ]
The true university of these days is a collection of books. [ Carlyle ]
A library is but the soul's burial ground; it is the land of shadows. [ H. W. Beecher ]
Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age. [ G. Bancroft ]
He that revels in a well-chosen library has innumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavor. [ William Godwin ]
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pin-heads. [ Holmes ]
The careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scholars do in their great libraries. [ F. B. Sanborn ]
Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race. [ Bovee ]
Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed. [ Lord Bacon ]
Libraries are the wardrobes of our literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. [ J. Dyer ]
A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner: it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many. [ Seneca ]
Great libraries of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats - that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners! [ Isaac Disraeli ]
He has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world, and the glories of a modern one. [ Longfellow ]
Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this. [ William Ellery Channing ]
The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again. [ Hamerton ]
No possession can surpass, or even equal, a good library to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures which never cloy. [ John Alfred Langford ]
The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets the notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance around his book-shelves. [ O. W. Holmes ]
If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library (the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford). [ James I ]
What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! [ Horace Smith ]
Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
We enter our studies, and enjoy a society which we alone can bring together. We raise no jealousy by conversing with one in preference to another; we give no offence to the most illustrious by questioning him as long as we will, and leaving him as abruptly. Diversity of opinion raises no tumult in our presence: each interlocutor stands before us, speaks or is silent, and we adjourn or decide the business at our leisure. [ Landor ]
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. [ Emerson ]
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. [ Charles Lamb ]