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| Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. | | Mark Twain | |
| Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life | | Robert Louis Stevenson | |
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| Books are immortal sons deifying their sires | | Plato | |
| Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. | | Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
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| Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. | | Joseph Addison | |
| Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. | | Henry David Thoreau | |
| Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes. | | Edward Gibbon | |
| Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital. | | Thomas Jefferson | |
| Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all | | Abraham Lincoln | |
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| 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 | |
| Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast. | | Samuel Johnson | |
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| Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. | | Marcel Proust | |
| Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author | | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | |
| For my own part, my belief in the perfection of the Deity will not permit me to believe that a book so manifestly obscure, disorderly, and contradictory can be His work | | Thomas Paine | |
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| How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. | | Henry David Thoreau | |
