Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.

Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So…a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.

Are you kidding? I'm supposed to put my books in this filthy tin coffin?

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.

I view askance a book that remains undisturbed for a year. Oughtn't it to have a ticket of leave? I think I may safely say no bookin my library remains unopened a year at a time, except my own works and Tennyson's.

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

I still like paper books. Like, book is a flammable object. After you read it, you could use it to get warm. Or it could become a pile of napkins.