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

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I like to have a man’s knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.