quotations about libraries
When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian.
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
slogan
My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.
PETER GOLKIN
attributed, The Librarian's Book of Quotes
I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me -- nature's not what I cling to. I cling to books.
EMILY WING SMITH
Back When You Were Easier to Love
Thou can'st not die. Here thou art more than safe
Where every book is thy epitaph.
HENRY VAUGHAN
attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
ANNE FADIMAN
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Libraries are not a cost. They are an investment.
STEVE KRAFT
"Libraries need to embrace change to remain vital", Guelph Today, June 12, 2016
A great library contains the diary of the human race.
GEORGE DAWSON
Address on Opening the Birmingham Free Library
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
SHELBY FOOTE
attributed, North Carolina Libraries
Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age.
GEORGE BANCROFT
History of the Colonization of the United States
My library is a friend of a thousand years.
KYO-SYA
attributed, Day's Collacon
Libraries ... are as the shrines where all the relics of ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays Or Counsels, Civil & Moral
It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA
The Historian
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country
The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-travelling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor: the ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise; odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold.
ROBERT ELDRIDGE ARIS WILLMOTT
Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature
You receive this writing that you may know how to preserve the books which I shall deliver to you; and you shall set these in order and anoint them with oil of cedar and put them away in earthen vessels.
APOCRYPHA
Testament of Moses 1:16-18
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
ANATOLE FRANCE
La Vie littéraire
A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROY
My Reading Life
Th' first thing to have in a lib'ry is a shelf. Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th' shelf is th' main thing.
FINLEY PETER DUNNE
Mr. Dooley Says