Preserving Knowledge Quotes

Books served to keep hard-won knowledge safe. They endured.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

Books have always been to me like a kind of embalmed mind. The dead may be scattered, and who can find them, but their voices live in the library.

Some knowledge and some song and some beauty must be kept for those days before the world again plunges into darkness.

We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.