Elbert Hubbard Quotes

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.

Nobody wants an ugly book.

Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book.

It is not how many books thou hast, but how good; careful reading profiteth, while that which is full of variety delighteth.

The point of page one is to make people turn to page two and if at the end of the book people think that the book was good value for money, you have achieved something, because if you haven't achieved those things you're not going to achieve the other thing.

Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.

I love books. If they are good books, I love them even more. But even if they are bad books, I still love them.

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.

Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.

Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties.

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

Generally as a rule I am not. Unless I am super in love with a particular author, because I just want to read masterpieces. I just want to read one amazing book after another. As a completist you are generally reading the bad ones.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.

We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000.