Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

A book is a souvenir of an idea.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books.

The rainbow is such a remarkable phenomenon of nature, and its cause has been so meticulously sought after by inquiring minds throughout the ages, that I could not choose a more appropriate subject for demonstrating how, with the method I am using, we can arrive at knowledge not possessed at all by those whose writings are available to us.

...a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself."

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

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

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.

People die, but books never die.

There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.

Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

The truth is we're all probably more creative than we realize, except we spend our lives watching TV or reading somebody else's book. We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

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

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.