Sam Weller Quotes

I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library. I was around nine years old when I began choosing my own books in earnest.

I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library.

Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot.

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.

And where does magic come from? I think that magic's in the learning.

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered 'Encyclopedia Brown' and 'Nancy Drew,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Rebecca.' This was where I became inspired to be a writer.

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch.

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

I spy with my little eye a great story.

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.