48 Inspiring Quotes About Libraries

In a world where digital screens often dominate our attention, the timeless sanctuary of libraries continues to hold a unique and profound allure. Libraries are not just buildings filled with books; they are treasure troves of knowledge, gateways to different worlds, and silent witnesses to the passage of time. They inspire creativity, foster lifelong learning, and offer a haven for introspection. For those who recognize the magic and importance of libraries, or simply love to get lost in a good book, we've curated a collection of the top 48 inspiring quotes about libraries. These quotes celebrate the essence and significance of these hallowed halls, reminding us of the power and joy that lies within their walls. Dive in and let these words rekindle your love for libraries, old and new.

1. “Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!” - Charles Ogden

2. “What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.” - Harold Howe

3. “Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.” - Carl Sagan

4. “Libraries are our friends.” - Neil Gaiman

5. “I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.” - Scott Douglas

6. “In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. ” - Alberto Manguel

7. “If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ” - Alberto Manguel

8. “Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.” - Alberto Manguel

9. “What in the world would we do without our libraries?” - Katharine Hepburn

10. “You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.” - Neil Gaiman

12. “Before parents accept the wisdeom of a school board to cut school librarians, they should ask: Will my child graduate with a 21st-century resume, or a 19th-century transcript? . . . As the information landscape becomes ever more complex, why does a school district want to abandon its professional guides to it?” - Mark Moran

13. “...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!” - George MacDonald

14. “I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.” - Marilyn Johnson

15. “They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?” - Sara Sheridan

16. “I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” - Ray Bradbury

17. “Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.” - Jo Walton

18. “...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.” - Owen Gingerich

19. “The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.” - Polly Horvath

20. “Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!” - Roman Payne

21. “I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” - Virginia Woolf

22. “I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?” - Ray Bradbury

23. “Εκείνη η τέλεια γαλήνη στη ζωή που δεν μπορεί να βρεθεί παρά μόνο στην απόσυρση, σε ένα καλό φίλο, σε μια καλή βιβλιοθήκη.” - Behn Aphra

24. “Υπάρχουν άνθρωποι που έχουν μια βιβλιοθήκη, όπως οι ευνούχοι έχουν ένα χαρέμι.” - Hugo Victor 1802-1885

25. “Οι άνθρωποι μπορούν να χάσουν τις ζωές τους στις βιβλιοθήκες. Θα πρέπει να προειδοποιούνται.” - Saul Bellow

26. “Μη δανείζετε ποτέ βιβλία σας σε φίλους. Κανένας δεν τα επιστρέφει. Τα μοναδικά βιβλία που έχουν μείνει στη βιβλιοθήκη μου είναι όσα μου εδάνεισαν κατά καιρούς οι φίλοι μου.” - Anatole France

27. “Αν δεν ήμουν βασιλεύς, θα ήθελα να είμαι επιστήμων. Και αν με έβαζαν στη φυλακή, η επιθυμία μου θα ήταν η φυλακή μου να μην ήταν τίποτε άλλο από μια σπουδαία βιβλιοθήκη” - Ιάκωβος της Αγγλίας

28. “Οι βιβλιοθήκες είναι οι ιματιοθήκες της φιλολογίας” - Τζων Ντνέρ

29. “Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.” - Toby Forward

30. “What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]” - Archibald MacLeish

31. “She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.” - Gary Paulsen

32. “You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.” - Erica Bauermeister

33. “‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” - Kurt Vonnegut

34. “Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.” - Siri Hustvedt

35. “I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.” - Mo Willems

36. “My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L.” - Catherynne M. Valente

37. “It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.” - Jo Walton

38. “Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)” - Neil Gaiman

39. “Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.” - Dinaw Mengestu

40. “Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

41. “All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.” - Avi Steinberg

42. “In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there” - Jane Austen

43. “Ο μόνος τόπος στον οποίο η αθανασία είναι παρούσα, βρίσκεται στις βιβλιοθήκες!” - Γκρεγκόριαν Δ ντής βιβλιοθήκης Ν.Υ

44. “Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.” - Kit Pearson

45. “There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.” - Terry Pratchett

46. “To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.” - R. David Lankes

47. “I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste.” - Charles Schulz

48. “Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.” - Stephen Greenblatt