52 Inspiring Library Quotes

Looking for a dose of inspiration? Libraries have long been the sanctuaries of wisdom, filled with countless stories, knowledge, and endless possibilities. In this blog post, we've gathered an uplifting selection of the top 52 library quotes that celebrate the magic of libraries. Whether you're a librarian, an avid reader, or simply someone who appreciates the serenity of a quiet reading nook, these quotes are sure to resonate and inspire. Join us as we dive into the words of authors, scholars, and book lovers who have eloquently captured the essence of what makes libraries so special.

1. “The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.” - Robert Musil

2. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” - Jane Austen

3. “The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition.” - Don Borchert

4. “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.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

5. “The world is quiet here.” - Lemony Snicket

6. “Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.” - Alberto Manguel

7. “At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.” - Alberto Manguel

8. “I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.” - Alberto Manguel

9. “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

10. “In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.” - Alberto Manguel

11. “Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.” - Alberto Manguel

12. “It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.” - Anne Fadiman

13. “It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.” - Elizabeth Kostova

14. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.” - Haruki Murakami

15. “If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.” - Dorothy Gambrell

16. “Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.” - Walter Savage Landor

17. “She'd absolutely adored the library_an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.” - Ally Carter

18. “Your library is your paradise.” - Desiderius Erasmus

19. “You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.” - Jasper Fforde

20. “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.” - Betty Smith

21. “A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.” - Stewart Brand

22. “A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.” - Daniel Handler

23. “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

24. “-Mikhail?...Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?” - Christine Feehan

25. “But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did–he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve.As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way–like the moon.” - Tao Lin

26. “There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.” - J. Donald Adams

27. “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” - Albert Einstein

28. “He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag."My God," he said. "What happened?""I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.” - Laura Whitcomb

29. “The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.” - David Eddings

30. “Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.” - Scott Douglas

31. “Some people write letters, in the library.” - Margaret Atwood

32. “I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.” - Ray Bradbury

33. “The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC)... to establish a superior library reflecting the religious and intellectual traditions both of the Islamic and Western civilizations.” - Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

34. “He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.” - Chris Adrian

35. “Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.” - Ray Bradbury

36. “Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.” - Jorge Luis Borges

37. “Because that's what Hermione does,' said Ron, shrugging. 'When in doubt, go to the library.” - J.K. Rowling

38. “Why can't I just Google it like everything else?! I hate you public library system!” - Vera Brosgol

39. “But we're a university! We have to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?""Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.” - Terry Pratchett

40. “Now look," snapped the Dean, "we've searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn't one! It's ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to get anything done?” - Terry Pratchett

41. “PAPER TOWERSThe library was on the second floor of the House, not far from my room. It had two floors—the first held the majority of the books and a balcony wrapped in a wrought-iron railing held another set. It was a cavalcade of tomes, all in immaculate rows, and with study carrels and tables thrown in for good measure. It was my home away from home(away from home.I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge. The library was empty of patrons as far as I could tell, but I could hear the rhythmic squeal of a library cart somewhere in the rows. I followed them down until I found the dark-haired vampire shelving books with mechanical precision. I knew him only as “the librarian.” He was a fount of information, and he had a penchant for leaving books outside my door.” - Chloe Neill

42. “Πατρίδα είναι το μέρος όπου έχει κανείς τα βιβλία του.” - Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ

43. “Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.""How I got over” - Darryl Pinckney

44. “In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.” - John Bright

45. “Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know where to start.” - Alexander McCall Smith

46. “I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.” - Thomas Jefferson

47. “It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-‘Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more than 100,000 volumes collection arranged in classified order.” - Balqis Suja'

48. “Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.” - Lavie Tidhar

49. “He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.” - Lauren DeStefano

50. “She'd absolutely adored the library-an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.” - Ally Carter

51. “I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.” - Edward Bellamy

52. “If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.” - Mark Pryor