"Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live."
Anthony Trollope
Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book
"To one whose business is with books there can be nothing more alluring than the contemplation at very close range of that astonishing phenomenon by which we all live--the public."
William McFee
The High Seas Bookshop
"In the hour after dinner, unless that had a state affair, Napoleon used to glance over books, throwing those which did not interest him upon the floor or into the fire. When on the road, it was the Emperor's usual practice to pitch ephemeral literature, and books which did not please him, out of the windows of his .... J. This explains why not infrequently books bearing his arms are to be found advertised in sale catalogues of London and Paris booksellers."
James Westfall Thompson Thompson
Byways in Bookland
"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book, who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."
John Milton
Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book
"On a certain shelf in the bookcase are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy. Each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins. These favorite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature, but out of the world of books I have singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men."
Alexander Smith
Dreamthorp
"How uncomprehendingly must an angel from heaven smile on a poor human sitting engrossed in a romance: angled upon his hams, motionless in his chair, spectacles on nose, his two feet as close together as the flukes of a merman 's tail, only his strange eyes stirring in his timeworn face."
Walter de la Mare