19th-century Librarian Quotes

Pope Pius XI

Robert Musil

Melvil Dewey

John Shaw Billings

John Cotton Dana

Arthur Elmore Bostwick

Henry Jenner

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

Where shall we get religion? Beneath the open sky, the sphere of crystal silence surcharged with deity.. The midnight earth sends incense up, sweet with the breath of prayer -- Go out beneath the naked night and get religion there.

Sam Walter Foss

Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.

John Vance Cheney

There's nothing really difficult if you only begin - some people contemplate a task until it looms so big, it seems impossible, but I just begin and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done.

John Shaw Billings

For what will it profit men that a more prudent distribution and use of riches make it possible for them to gain even the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their own souls? What will it profit to teach them sound principles in economics, if they permit themselves to be so swept away by selfishness, by unbridled and sordid greed, that hearing the commandments of the Lord, they do all things contrary.

Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish.

Knicks and dull edges are abominations, so use knives and hatchets for nothing but they were made for.

Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

John Cotton Dana

It is easier to make true misleading statements in the subject of probabilities than anywhere else.

Arthur Elmore Bostwick

The advancement of science ought ever to be the aim of philosophers, independent of all petty jealousies.

Charles Richard Weld

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.