quotations about libraries
Living in a library is the realization of liberal education, the feverish road to getting more from college than a degree.
DOUGLAS M. STEHLE
"Information Literacy as Liberal Education", Musings, Meanderings, and Monsters, Too: Essays on Academic Librarianship
My pen is my harp and my lyre; my library is my garden and my orchard.
JUDAH HA-LEVI
attributed, Life's Little Book of Big Jewish Advice
A good library is a great kingdom.
MAGLIABECCHI
attributed, Day's Collacon
The richest minds need not large libraries.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture. People adore them.... The grandest libraries, built like monstrous cathedrals, are particularly beloved. It ought to follow, then, that the ultimate library--an infinite library--would be revered as a utopia, especially in an age where data is seen as its own currency. But libraries have a dark side in the cultural imagination.... In the real world, the dawn of the written word incited the same kinds of anxieties that accompany any new technology that reorders people's relationship with information.... The evolution of such fears and perceptions as they apply to information systems--from books, to machines, to artificial intelligence, and beyond--is perhaps a natural one. At the very least, it's predictable. Books are, after all, technology.
ADRIENNE LAFRANCE
"The Human Fear of Total Knowledge", The Atlantic, June 3, 2016
Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.
STUART DYBEK
The Coast of Chicago
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
STEPHEN FRY
The Liar
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
The Library at Night
Great libraries of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats--that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners!
ISAAC DISRAELI
Curiosities of Literature
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
ANNE HERBERT
"The Next Whole Earth Catalog", 1980
Library
Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
RICHARD ARMOUR
Light Armour
A great public library, in its catalogue and its physical disposition of its books on shelves, is the monument of literary genres.
ROBERT MELANCON
attributed, World Literature Today, spring 1982
As a breed, local and community librarians ceaselessly challenge the constraints of isolation.
FELICITY HAYES-MCCOY
"The Library at the Edge of the World author: libraries are a community's heart", The Irish Times, June 8, 2016
He obviously regards libraries as dinosaurs that are only repositories for books. Before the digital age, that was somewhat true; however, libraries long ago saw the information age coming and have adapted quite well. Libraries no longer look at their mission as being a "book lender," but as community centers available to the public for the dissemination of information.
P. D. MOWBRAY, JR.
"Libraries are more than books", Roanoke Times, May 19, 2016
A library is but the soul's burial ground; it is the land of shadows. Yet one is impressed with the thought, the labor, and the struggle, represented in this vast catacomb of books. Who could dream, by the placid waters that issue from the level mouths of brooks into the lake, all the plunges, the whirls, the divisions, and foaming rushes that had brought them down to the tranquil exit? And who can guess through what channels of disturbance, and experiences of sorrow, the heart passed that has emptied into this Dead Sea of books?
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Star Papers: Or, Experiences of Art and Nature
Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
SAUL BELLOW
"Him with His Foot in His Mouth", Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
God hath given to mankind a common library, His creatures; to every man a proper book, himself being an abridgment of all others. If thou read with understanding, it will make thee a great master of philosophy, and a true servant of the divine Author: if thou but barely read, it will make thee thine own wise man and the Author's fool.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Enchiridion
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
ANNE FADIMAN
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers