Library quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The way an old dog finds his way back over miles and miles to his home when somebody trues to shove him off on a farm someplace, that is how I find my way back to the library. It's my place, even more than my place is.

To take pride in a library kills it. Then, its motive power shifts over to the critical if admiring visitor, and apologies are necessary and acceptable and the fat is in the fire.

The intelligent and efficient politician is a species virtually unknown in the galaxy. Perhaps I might secure a scraping [for my] cell library.

George R. R. Martin

And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence. But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.

Nag Hammadi library

You can take the girl out of the library, but you can't take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.

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

You know you knit too much when... You will check out a book from the library just because you heard that one of the characters knits.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.

Peter Lewis Allen

A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window… I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it.

For I am the one who alone exists,
and I have no one who will judge me.

Nag Hammadi library

Why do you curse me and honor me?
You have wounded and you have had mercy.
Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have [known].
[And] do not cast anyone [out nor] turn anyone away.

Nag Hammadi library

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Lois McMaster Bujold

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No... eight days a week.

Alan Bradley (writer)

Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves.

In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.

One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.

I knew that the library was also the materialization of a certain level of the psyche, even as our world is. Only there, time is laid out like space is here. The windows of the library coincide with definite places in our space-time. In our world, these points of intersection may appear as natural objects, and these correlate with coordination points in your psyche. Moving toward these coordination points in your mind automatically lines up your consciousness to some extent with this other reality, and stabilizes conditions enough to allow for more or less conscious entry and return.

Above all I commend the study of Christ. Let Him be your library.

Charles Spurgeon

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

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'

Dad told Uncle Seth not to screw things up, she informed me as we washed our hands. He said even if Uncle Seth is famous, him getting a woman like you defies belief. I laughed and smoothed down the skirt of my dress. I don't know about that. I don't think your dad gives your uncle enough credit." Brandy gave me a sage look, worthy of someone much older. Uncle Seth spent last Valentine's Day at a library.

My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.

There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently... she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader— because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..