Library famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
-- Alan Bennett -
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
-- Alan Bennett -
A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
-- Alberto Manguel -
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
-- Alberto Manguel -
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
-- Alberto Manguel -
We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
-- Alberto Manguel -
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
-- Alberto Manguel -
I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
-- Alberto Manguel -
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
-- Alberto Manguel -
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
-- Alberto Manguel -
I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.
-- Alex Haley -
Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.
-- Alex Haley -
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
-- Alexander Smith -
Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.
-- Alexander Smith -
There was an extensive collection of cookbooks in the well-stocked library, and he took to pouring over these in the evenings.
-- Alexandra Adornetto -
America, why are your libraries full of tears?
-- Allen Ginsberg -
A library is a hospital for the mind.†- Anonymous
-- Alvin Toffler -
In Africa, when an old man dies, it's a library burning.
-- Amadou Hampate Ba -
Every old man that dies is a library that burns.
-- Amadou Hampate Ba -
The richest minds need not large libraries.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott -
The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.
-- Amy Bloom -
A library is the only single place you can go to learn something new, be comforted, terrified, thrilled, saddened, overjoyed, or excited all in one day. And for free.
-- Amy Neftzger -
If it is right that schools should be maintained by the whole community for the well-being of the whole, it is right also that libraries should be so maintained.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
-- Andrew Wiles -
Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
-- Anita Brookner -
As a journalist I'm comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.
-- Anita Diament -
There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.
-- Annabelle Selldorf -
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
-- Anne Fadiman -
I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questions
-- Anne Rice -
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
-- Anthony Hecht -
Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.
-- Anthony Horowitz -
That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
-- Aphra Behn -
Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.
-- Aravind Adiga -
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
-- Archibald MacLeish -
I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.
-- Arthur Ashe -
Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.
-- Arthur Ashe -
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
-- Arthur Baer -
Alliances are crucial to success in the political sphere. However, if we are to approach other organizations to propose alliances for the public good, we must be prepared to assert a far more important role for the library. We must clearly define what we do and establish and assert the relationship of libraries to basic democratic freedoms, to the fundamental humanistic principles that are central to our very way of life. . . .
-- Arthur Curley -
The Web is cool, but the library is magic.
-- Arthur Plotnik -
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant -
Whole libraries can be filled with the papers written about cancer and its causes, but the contents of these papers fit on one little library visiting card.
-- August Bier -
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
-- Augustine Birrell -
A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.
-- Augustine Birrell -
The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.
-- Augustine Birrell -
My library is filled with UN condemnations.
-- Augusto Pinochet -
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
-- Ayn Rand -
Literacy is the most basic currency of the knowledge economy.
-- Barack Obama -
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there...
-- Barbara Pym -
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.
-- Baron de Montesquieu -
One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
-- Bell Hooks -
Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
-- Ben Aaronovitch -
You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.
-- Ben Affleck -
Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore.
-- Benjamin Carson -
You asked me where I generally lived. In my workshop [i.e. in his study] in the mornings and always in the library in the evening. Books are companions even if you don’t open them.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
-- Bernard Berenson -
To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.
-- Bernard Lewis -
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
-- Beverly Cleary -
If you have a question about anything, the answer can be found in a book somewhere in the library.
-- Bill Cosby -
In the library I discovered that you could learn by following your nose. And I learned that a book was as close to a living thing as you could get without being one.
-- Bill Harley -
When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.
-- Bill Moyers -
My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.
-- Bill Russell -
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup -
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries
-- Bjarne Stroustrup -
The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further - universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable
-- Brewster Kahle -
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
-- Bruce Feiler -
We need to bridge the gap between the medical libraries and the hospital rooms; take the information out there already, add to it, focus it, harness it - and bring it to the patient who was just diagnosed today.
-- Bruce Vento -
Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been
-- Bryce Courtenay -
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival.
-- Caitlin Moran -
And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.
-- Caitlin Moran -
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
-- Carl Sagan -
I have been ineluctably drawn to libraries ever since I entered that sanctum sanctorum. It was a place of quietude. In a world where things go beep and ding and ring, where you’ve got mail and you’ve got messages, when I enter a library, I feel that I am still entering a temple.
-- Carmen Agra Deedy -
The most beautiful people are all in the library.
-- Caroline Kennedy -
... as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the ideal library is in the wish of its maker.
-- Carolyn Wells -
To make a library It takes two volumes And a fire. Two volumes and a fire, And interest. The interest alone will do If logs are few.
-- Carolyn Wells -
It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.
-- Carolyn Wells -
She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.
-- Catherynne M. Valente -
A library is never complete. That’s the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.
-- Catherynne M. Valente -
Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.
-- Cecil B. DeMille
