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The Most Inspirational Quotes About Libraries

In the age of Wikipedia, Google and the digitization of books, many have written off the library as a hub of knowledge and information.

Nowadays, libraries all over the world have to adapt to survive the digital transformation in the educational and informational sector. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the library as an institution has not only been an important driver for education, but also for the development of of the society as a whole.

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Today, it’s role has become even more important: the digitization of knowledge means we need a new form of information literacy and the library should be at the center of this agenda. We have always been dependent on the wise words of others to become knowledgeable, an that’s where libraries’ function resides: transmitting the knowledge from generation to generation.

Writers and philosophers alike have discussed in length the importance of libraries and why it should exist. Authors such as Socrates, Borges, Malcolm X, Beecher among many others have argued that libraries are a necessity for the progress of society. They are the place where ideas are born and where progress is identified. For others, the library played an important role in their childhood andthe development of their skills.

Read our quotes about library to find out the words and opinions from some of the great minds.

I’m not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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 hadthe digiti said.

Peter Lewis Allen

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Henri Frederic Amiel

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Isaac Asimov

A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.

Arthur Baer

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.

Henry Ward Beecher

That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.

Aphra Behn

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

Tony Benn

If your library is not ‘unsafe,’ it probably isn’t doing its job.

John Berry

The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one’s children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.

Bruno Bettelheim

People go back to the stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don’t have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.

Frank Black

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

Jorge Luis Borges

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Ray Bradbury

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

John Braine

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Anthony Burgess

It may not be possible to get rare roast beef but if you’re willing to settle for well done, ask them to hold the sweetened library paste that passes for gravy.

Marian Burros

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

Laura Bush

I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.

John Le Carre

It was an incredible resource. I’d sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the ‘Talk of the Town’ sections.

Michael Chabon

First, this isn’t about telecommuting, because we still have offices that people will come to regularly when they need to brainstorm together, meet with clients, or do research in the library.

Jay Chiat

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

Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

Beverly Cleary

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

Bram Cohen

Dynasty was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than waiting around like a library book waiting to be loaned out.

Joan Collins

So he said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.’ I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.’

Tommy Cooper

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

Norman Cousins

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.

Norman Cousins

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day. ‘Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here’s Matt researching in aisle six of his local library’. A few hours of that and they’d go home.

Matt Damon

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

Rodney Dangerfield

As a journalist I’m comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.

Anita Diament

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.

John Dingell

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

Rita Dove

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

Rita Dove

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Arthur Conan Doyle

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Alan Dundes

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.

Philip Emeagwali

Your library is your paradise.

Desiderius Erasmus

However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.

Richard Ernst

I’ve got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.

Joseph Fiennes

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.

Mark Foley

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

Anatole France

I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.

Thomas Friedman

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

Stephen Fry

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

Cornelia Funke

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

Cornelia Funke

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

Cornelia Funke

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area.

Neil Gaiman

Why by a book when you can join a library.

Ricky Gervais

I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

Tom Glazer

Then I started checking out blues albums from the library and playing the harp along with them.

John Goodman

I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I’d pick out an author and I would read all their books.

Tom T. Hall

There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Anthony Hecht

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

My books are very few, but then the world is before me – a library open to all – from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me – in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.

Joseph Howe

A library implies an act of faith.

Victor Hugo

Your library is your portrait.

Holbrook Jackson

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Lady Bird Johnson

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 a book.

Samuel Johnson

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

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

Samuel Johnson

When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.

Alexander Kluge

I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it’s fresh.

Leo Kottke

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

Leo Kottke

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn’t time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

Charles Kuralt

I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.

Hedy Lamarr

The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.

Joseph Lancaster

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

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.

Doris Lessing

Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.

James Loeb

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

Archibald MacLeish

My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Malcolm X

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

Groucho Marx

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

Kurt Masur

My best friend growing up really put the bug in my ear about acting. We created this one hour-and-a-half improv play when we were 10 or 11 and performed it at the library. We just played off each other so well and had the best time doing it and the funniest part was, we wound up having packed houses, other people loved it too.

Katherine Moennig

I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.

Mike Myers

If you’re setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.

Graham Nelson

Yes, there’s such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o’clock in the morning. You’ll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Louis Nizer

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Martin Lewis Perl

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

I don’t know what your childhood was like, but we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.

Robert Redford

We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That’s the only disadvantage.

Mordecai Richler

Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don’t think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there’s always a library.

Michelle Rodriguez

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

Carl T. Rowan

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

Mark Ruffalo

A library is thought in cold storage.

Herbert Samuel

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

Jose Saramago

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people’s private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.

Jose Serrano

I wanted to be in a band that gave bang for the buck. I wanted to be in the band who didn’t look like a bunch of guys who, you know, should be in a library studying for their finals.

Gene Simmons

We didn’t have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn’t have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library – and anyway, I told myself stories.

John Sladek

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Alexander Smith

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

Bjarne Stroustrup

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

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I’d do arithmetic exercises.

Clyde Tombaugh

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

Barbara Tuchman

I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.

Walter Wager

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn’t.

Carolyn Wells

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

Andrew Wiles

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

Frank Zappa

That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library

Aphra Behn

The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library

Ashleigh Brilliant

The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further — universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable,

Brewster Kahle

Some of the women in town took a red wagon and went door to door collecting books. The first library was the upstairs of the old village hall building, and it was there for many years.

Carlton Whitney

I love to read, but I didn’t know how I could keep up with my eyes, … But I remembered that the library had books on tape, so I started listening to them. You wouldn’t believe how much they have brought to my life.

Dorothy Bryant

I love the Plymouth library. I went to the history room and read the book on the 20th century history of Plymouth and thought it was great. I read they were going to do a second book. I hadn’t thought about that case in years, but it all came back. I read what was available on it and realized we needed a more balanced treatment.

Gail Begley

This tax allows the county to spend money in other ways that might not hold up on a referendum such as this. Nobody wants to vote against the library. I don’t know if voters have the heart to vote down the library.

Joe Brennan

This is an unprecedented event that allows for raising some serious money for such an important resource as the library and also brings great regional attention to our area.

Joel Anderson

I’ve got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.”

Joseph Fiennes

The best of my education has come from the public library… my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents for an overdue book. You don’t need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.

Lesley Conger

I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world’s cuisines, past and present, was available on request.

Luigi Barzine

Some men have only one book in them, others a library

Proverb

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library: a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years…. The thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The church is part of a cultural precinct that includes the museum and historical society, theatre, school, library and community college,

Rob Drew

It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. that learning, books, education have glamour, that self-improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.

Vartan Gregorian

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