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Nag Hammadi library

Nag Hammadi library

Library quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Cicero

Samuel Johnson

Archibald MacLeish

Barbara W. Tuchman

Sandra Cisneros

Stephen Fry

Tony Benn

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.

Simeon Strunsky

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library.

What is more important in a library than anything else—than everything else—is the fact that it exists.

Archibald MacLeish

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

Augustine Birrell

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.

Lawrence Lessig

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Photography is more than a means of recording the obvious. It is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever, whether it be a face or a flower, a place or a thing, a day or a moment. The camera is a perfect companion. It makes no demands, imposes no obligations. It becomes your notebook and your reference library, your microscope and your telescope. It sees what you are too lazy or too careless to notice, and it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Perhaps no place in any community is so democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.

Lady Bird Johnson

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

Barbara W. Tuchman

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

Lawrence Clark Powell

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas — a place where history comes to life.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

Sandra Cisneros

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university.

If you file your waste-paper basket for 50 years, you have a public library.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Henry David Thoreau

This Library afforded me the Means of Improvement by constant Study, for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day; and thus repair'd in some Degree the Loss of the Learned Education my Father once intended for me. Reading was the only Amusement I allow'd myself. I spent no time in Taverns, Games, or Frolics of any kind. And my Industry in my Business continu'd as indefatigable as it was necessary.

Benjamin Franklin

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.