Written Knowledge Quotes

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

The written word is everything.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.

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.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Law dies, books never.

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

Let no man despise the oracles of books! A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh and motion and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.

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.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.

Books are dead men talking.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

The teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.

. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .

Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven :- That is by letters written with their quills.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors that they are ready to repeat their lessons as often as we please.

Books are humanity in print.