Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.

Books are sepulchres of thought.

Books are men of higher stature, and the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Books -lighthouses erected in the great sea of time -books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius -books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes, -these were to visit the firesides of the humble and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

Books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.

I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Books represent the accumulated workings of the human mind, the endless treasures of man's thoughts.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

A book is the only immortality.

I believe in books. And when our people [coughing] - our people of Jerusalem, let's say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that's all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book - the little book - and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

Laws die, books never.

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

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.

nothing decorates a home like books. There they are, waiting to decorate the mind, too!

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.