In Praise of Books

The books we read help to shape who we are. Reading offers us, as children, our first independence — allowing us to travel far beyond the confines of our immediate world. Books introduce us to great figures in history, narratives that stir our spirit, fictions that tug us out of ourselves and into the lives of a thousand others, and visions of every era through which human beings have lived. And in the process of stretching who we are, books also connect us to all others — of our own or previous times — who have read what we've read. In the community of readers, we instantly become linked to those who share our love for specific characters or passages.

"A well-composed book," says Caroline Gordon, "is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

Here, then, are some words in praise of that magic carpet.

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Books may well be the only true magic.

Alice Hoffman

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A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

Caroline Gordon (1895-1981)

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Books are the carriers of civilization ... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989)

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Good books are the warehouses of ideas. H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

JONATHAN RABAN For Love and Money (1987)

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I grew up kissing books and bread.

Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands (1992)

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Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul — what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands (1992)

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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands (1992)

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How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay the very odour (beyond Russia) if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating library" Tom Jones or Vicar of Wakefield. How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight.

Charles Lamb "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" (1822)

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A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia (1833)

Books must be the axe to break the frozen sea inside me. FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924)

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on a purpose to a life beyond life.

John Milton "Areopagitica" (1644)

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are: nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest effigy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

John Milton "Areopagitica" (1644)

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Benjamin Disraeli A Speech in Glasgow (November 19, 1873)

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A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) Memoirs (1974)

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It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.

Voltaire (1694-1778)

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Books are the true levellers.

William Ellery Channing, "Self-Culture" (1838)

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My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.

Mark Twain Notebook (December 11, 1885)

I suggest that 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 "Two Cheers for Democracy" (1951)

Laws die, books never.

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

Books are necessary to correct the vices of the polite.

Oliver Goldsmith (C. 1730-1774)

Real education consists in drawing the best out of yourself. What better book can there be than the book of humanity?

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor, and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.

Francis Bacon "Of Counsel" (1625)

The pale usher — threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars, it somehow mildly reminded him of his own mortality.

Herman Melville Moby Dick (1851)

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Anita Brookner Novelists in Interview (1985)

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson "The American Scholar" (1837)

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things.

Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose (1981)

Until it is kindled by a spirit as lovingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Henry Miller The Books in My Life (1951)

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

Michel De Montaigne Essays (1580)

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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some are to be chewed And digested.

Francis Bacon Essays (1625)

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth and our persistent leaning toward error.

Joseph Conrad "Notes On Life and Letters" (1857-1924)

Books, like...