Quotations About Books

Quotes

• A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. -- Franz Kafka (1883-1924) Czech writer



• All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. -- Saul Bellow

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. ~ Bacon

The writings of the wise are the only riches that our posterity cannot squander. ~ Landor

Beware of the man of one book. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this, touches a man. ~ Whitman

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. ~ John Milton John Milton Information at Luminarium.org

You do not publish your own verses, Laelius; you criticize mine. Pray cease to criticize mine, or else publish your own. ~ Martial, Roman author

Byron says that “a small drop of ink may make millions think.” Many a time a book has decided the character of a man’s life. A book makes friends for you; for there springs up from its reading an acquaintanceship not only between you and the author, but between you and another man who reads the same book. Samuel Johnson, hearing that a man had read Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” exclaimed, “If I knew that man I could hug him.” It is said that Cæsar, when shipwrecked and in danger of drowning, did not try to save his gold, but took his Commentaries between his teeth and swam to shore. -- John Wilson, from a paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston.