Gordon B. Hinckley Quotes

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

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.

Books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

Books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction.

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.

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

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion.

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.

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.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.