Librarian Quotes

Pope Pius XI

Robert Musil

Laura Bush

Melvil Dewey

Archibald MacLeish

John Shaw Billings

James H. Billington

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

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

Coordinating the retreat was important too, so important that Jiaan had assigned Aram as Fasal's assistant, to be sure he didn't overlook anything important. Like the fact that they were supposed to retreat.

A miracle is a single mom who works two jobs to care for her kids and still helps them with their homework at night. A miracle is a child donating all the money in their piggy bank to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That's where you'll find the hand and face of God.

Forks are absurd, he scoffed. They insult your food. They make it think you're killing it twice.

Clare B. Dunkle

Don't waste time blaming yourself when you can spend time planning how to destroy our enemies.

Sarah Rees Brennan

The most wide-flung task in the universe is the exploration of the universe itself.

The good, the bad, that's just life. Let it go. There's no need to fret about the past. The question is: who are you going to share it with tomorrow?

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.

Lawrence Clark Powell

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.

In November, the smell of food is different. It is an orange smell. A squash and pumpkin smell. It tastes like cinnamon and can fill up a house in the morning, can pull everyone from bed in a fog. Food is better in November than any other time of the year.

She [Irene] wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.

You're walking by the tomb of Battiades, Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.

I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of a game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play

Juan Carlos Onetti

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.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.

Samuel Paterson

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.

Abstractions have a limiting, a dehumanizing, a dehydrating effect on the relation to things of the man who must live with them. The result is that we are more and more left, in our scientific society, without the means of knowledge of ourselves as we truly are or of our experience as it actually is.

Archibald MacLeish

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.

Material that might be illegal is such a minuscule part of what is available that we have to remember — and I mean not only librarians but everybody has to remember not to let it overshadow the incredible wealth of information that is available in this medium.

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.

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

Arthur Elmore Bostwick

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

John Cotton Dana