Sydney Smith Quotes

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.

It is my belief that books are living things.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

A book is a souvenir of an idea.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

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

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Books come from within.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

People don't care about books. They care about ideas.

Books still accomplish miracles; they persuade men.

My grandmother had a Ph.D in library science, so I grew up in a library, and I would appreciate those books and the smell of them and how they'd have these series, and it was cool to me. I always felt like, if I had an opportunity, I'd create an album that felt like a series.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

I think it's better to have ideas.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.