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There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.
-J. Donald Adams
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We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.
-Hugo Ball
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I myself spent hours at the Columbia library as intimidated and embarassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.
-Luigi Barzini
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A library is but the soul's burying ground. It is a land of shadows.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
-Augustine Birrell
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The deeper interior you have the more you have in your llibrary.
-Jacqueline Bisset, Interview on Chats from the Past
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In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
-Ray Bradbury
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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life.
-Norman Cousins
American Library Association Bulletin, October, 1954
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A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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A man's library is a sort of harem.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Your library is your paradise.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are those that other folks have lent me.
-Anatole France
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Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
-Germaine Greer
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A library implies an act of faith.
-Victor Hugo
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The great British Library -- one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.
-Washington Irving
The Sketch-Book, The Art of Book-Making, 1819-20
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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
-Samuel Johnson
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If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.
-Stephen Leacock
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It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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What is more important in a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.
-Archibald MacLeish
The Premise of Meaning, in American Scholar, (Washington, D.C.), June 5, 1972
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Books about Libraries
