intellectual refuge Quotes

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

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

Libraries are places where the damaged go to find friends

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

Since Germany seems bent upon getting rid of her brains, could not France offer to take in that “gray matter” that our neighbours seem to scorn? Could not the French government, above and beyond politics, offer Einstein, forced into exile by Germany, a chair in the College de France …

Thank God for books and music and things I can think about." --Charlie Gordan

When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

As a shy, introverted, scholarly child (long ago) I don't know what I would have done without libraries! My family moved often. I was always the new kid in town. The library always offered me my first and most important friendship: the place where I felt right at home. I still feel that way today, about libraries.

To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been . hunted out of every corner of the world.

Books are a finer world within the world.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.