Sourced and curated.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1891

★ 3.8

TV program · Fantasy (TV) · Drama (TV) · Fantasy · Drama

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.

Tyrion Lannister

Game of Thrones · 2011

★ 3.8

Philosophical literature

The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts.

Rene Descartes

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 3.7

Political literature

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.

John Milton

Areopagitica · 1644

★ 3.7

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood · 1987

★ 3.7

Interview · Magazine

I discovered me in the library.

Ray Bradbury

Paris Review · 2010

★ 3.7

Inscription

Medicine for the soul.

★ 3.7

Age, that Age appeared to be best in four things: Old Wood best to burn, Old Wine to drink, Old Friends to trust, and old Authors to read.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 3.6

Poem

Reach for the book: It is a weapon.

Bertolt Brecht

1935

★ 3.6

Political literature · Philosophical literature

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency-the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom

The Closing of the American Mind · 1987

★ 3.6

Lecture

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

William Ellery Channing

1838

★ 3.5

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka

1904

★ 3.5

Magazine

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

1981

★ 3.5

Newspaper

Sometimes I think of the books I'll never read that would have changed my life.

Jonathan Safran Foer

2005

★ 3.5

Autobiography and memoir

My alma mater was books.

Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X · 1965

★ 2.4

There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice · 1813

★ 2.3

Scripture · Religious literature

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Ecclesiastes 12:12

931 BC

★ 2.2

I cannot live without books.

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to John Adams, 1815 · 1815

★ 2.2

TV program · Sitcom · Comedy (TV) · Comedy

What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses-like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?

Jerry Seinfeld

Seinfeld · 1991

★ 2.2

Biography

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Samuel Johnson

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D · 1763

★ 2.0

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

On Heroes · 1840

★ 2.0

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 1.9

No furniture so charming as books.

Sydney Smith

1845

★ 1.9

I look at them as a child looks at a cake,-with glittering eyes and watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him!

Elizabeth Gaskell

1859

★ 1.9

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

1881

★ 1.9

Novel · Children's literature

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory · 1964

★ 1.9

Newspaper

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

1980

★ 1.9

Interview · Newspaper

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

Ray Bradbury

1993

★ 1.9

Newspaper

An accident of timing makes the book in question indelible.

Colson Whitehead

2005

★ 1.9

Interview · Magazine

There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt.

Ray Bradbury

Paris Review · 2010

★ 1.9

To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a childe that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping.

Henry Peacham

1622

★ 1.9

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

John Ruskin

1864

★ 1.9

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith

1931

★ 1.9

After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sport of all.

A.S.W. Rosenbach

A Book Hunter's Holiday · 1936

★ 1.9

TV program

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.

Carl Sagan

1980

★ 1.9

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

The Spectator · 1711

★ 1.8

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 got ourselves.

E.M. Forster

1944

★ 1.8

Letter · Philosophical literature

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cicero

44 BC

★ 1.3

Short story

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

1817

★ 1.3

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D'Urbervilles · 1891

★ 1.3

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

1753

★ 1.2

Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store!

Henry Ward Beecher

Star Papers · 1854

★ 1.2

Novel · Modernist literature

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 1.2