Best 1113 quotes in «library quotes» category

The student has his Rome, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’. A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping – a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called ‘the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries’. Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: ‘The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.

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

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

The world of books is the only paradise there is.

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.

This library is for humans only. I mean, non-human things can't get a library card issued to them.

They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.

This sense of possibility might not last, of course Nothing ever did. But she wasn’t going to spoil it by looking too far ahead. They were safe in the Library, and the Library would endure.

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.

Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.

Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court... -the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can. Use the library and the internet carefully for research and talk to people, about things that matter. To make a living from writing, and make people read again in Tanzania and Africa; we must write very well, very good stories.

Until one morning, one of the coldest mornings of the year, when I came in with the book cart and found Jean Hollis Clark, a fellow librarian, standing dead still in the middle of the staff room. "I heard a noise from the drop box," Jean said. "What kind of noise?" "I think it's an animal." "A what?" "An animal," Jean said. "I think there's an animal in the drop box." That was when I heard it, a low rumble from under the metal cover. It didn't sound like an animal. It sounded like an old man clearing his throat. Gurr-gug-gug. Gurr-gug-gug. But the opening at the top of the chute was only a few inches wide, so that would be quite a squeeze for an old man. It had to be an animal. But what kind? I got down on my knees, reached over the lid, and hoped for a chipmunk. What I got instead was a blast of freezing air. The night before, the temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn't take into account the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. And on that night, of all nights, someone had jammed a book into return slot, wedging it open. It was as cold in the box as it was outside, maybe colder, since the box was lined with metal. It was the kind of cold that made it almost painful to breathe. I was still catching my breath, in fact, when I saw the kitten huddled in the front left corner of the box. It was tucked up in a little space underneath a book, so all I could see at first was its head. It looked grey in the shadows, almost like a little rock, and I could tell its fur was dirty and tangled. Carefully, I lifted the book. The kitten looked up at me, slowly and sadly, and for a second I looked straight into its huge golden eyes. The it lowered its head and sank back down into its hole. At that moment, I lost every bone in my body and just melted.

To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.

To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.

To read is to renew thy mind.

Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

Until I was left with nothing but life and books, I realised these two gracious gifts, where enough for me to exist.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

To fully encapsulate my creativity, I read to inhale, write to exhale. The whole process helps me breathe story.

Twas a cold Yuletide evening, and I wandered the stacks, shelving multiple titles that the patrons brought back. We toiled overtime at our library here, 'cause the powers that be cut our staffing this year.

Você constrói mil castelos, mil santuários, você não é nada; você constrói uma biblioteca, você é tudo

We also wish to make it absolutely clear that Librarians should not attempt to use the Library to transport dinosaur eggs. And if they do disregard this rule, under no circumstances should they draw official in-world attention while doing so. In fact, we wish to remind all Librarians that they are here to collect books, not dinosaurs. Those Librarians who have problems distinguishing between the two should take a refresher course in Library basics.

We are bees then; our honey is language.

We are more in control of how much we know than we are of how much we have.

We are improved by reading books not by owning them.

We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity.

We awaken by asking the right questions.

We exist in the world of books.

We find paradise in every library and bookshop.

We are the Library," Coppelia pointed out. "What we don't know, we research.

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.

We find the library world, like the real world, impossible to understand on a rational basis. We turn then to the outer reaches of our mind and treat librarianship with the irrationality that it deserves. While we most often turn to humour merely to enjoy ourselves, we do sometimes do so to make a point. That point is simply that the world of librarianship is ridiculous and that we should all take a far less serious view of our work. What we accomplish as librarians is not, after all, likely to change the world." ~ Norman D. Stevens

Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

...when I look at and study the ranks of my books - for I have put the name of each author on the binding - I feel as if I am looking at the holy graves of those who wrote them.

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her. "These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.

What would I have done without books?

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ... Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ... The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ... The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

When I got my library card, that's when my life began.