A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

—Franz Kafka

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

—E. M. Forster

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

—Cicero

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

—Ray Bradbury

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

—Mark Twain

You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

—C.S. Lewis

Trusting children and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don’t know what might happen.

—Susan Ohanian

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

—Samuel Butler

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds... In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

—William Ellery Channing

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

—Chinese proverb

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

—Abraham Lincoln

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.                                         —Toni Morrison