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
The richest minds need not large libraries.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
A good library is a great kingdom.
MAGLIABECCHI
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
STEPHEN FRY
The Liar
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
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
Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
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
Library
Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
RICHARD ARMOUR
Light Armour
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
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
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
Thou can'st not die. Here thou art more than safe
Where every book is thy epitaph.
HENRY VAUGHAN
attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
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
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
I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me -- nature's not what I cling to. I cling to books.
EMILY WING SMITH
Back When You Were Easier to Love
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
Libraries are not a cost. They are an investment.
STEVE KRAFT
"Libraries need to embrace change to remain vital", Guelph Today, June 12, 2016