68 Inspirational Library Quotes

In the quiet aisles and the gentle rustle of pages, libraries hold a world of inspiration, wisdom, and discovery. These sanctuaries of knowledge offer more than just books; they embolden us with stories that shape our understanding and ignite our imagination. In this curated collection, we delve into the essence of libraries through 68 of the most inspiring quotes, each capturing the magic and transformative power of these remarkable spaces. Whether you're a lifelong bibliophile or a casual visitor, let these words remind you of the timeless allure and endless possibilities that await within the walls of a library.

1. “In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” - Mark Twain

2. “You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.” - Monty Python

3. “Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

4. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” - Saul Bellow

5. “The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.” - Terry Pratchett

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

7. “If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.” - John Berry

8. “You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.” - Elizabeth Kostova

9. “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” - Lemony Snicket

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

11. “I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.” - John Jakes

12. “I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them.” - Don Borchert

13. “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

14. “The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. ” - Alberto Manguel

15. “No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.” - Alberto Manguel

16. “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

17. “I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.” - Roger Zelazny

18. “Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.” - Barbara Pym

19. “The library is the worst group of people ever assembled in history. They're mean, conniving, rude, and extremely well-read, which makes them dangerous.” - Leslie Knope

20. “I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

21. “My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

22. “One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..” - bell hooks

23. “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

24. “It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.” - Neil Gaiman

25. “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” - Ray Bradbury

26. “...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

27. “To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads."[American Libraries Magazine, May 28, 2009]” - Jon Bing

28. “Libraries are a force for good. They wear capes. They fight evil. They don’t get upset when you don’t send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you’re late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn’t allow that torch to be extinguished.” - Libba Bray

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

30. “When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.” - Alan Moore

31. “Libraries raised me.” - Ray Bradbury

32. “Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.” - Jeanette Winter

33. “A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.” - Alan Dershowitz

34. “Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.” - Diana Wynne Jones

35. “...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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.” - Edmund S. Morgan

39. “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

40. “Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.” - Brian Selznick

41. “Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.” - Courtney Milan

42. “Αν έχεις ένα κήπο και μια βιβλιοθήκη, έχεις όλα όσα σου χρειάζονται.” - Cicero

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

44. “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

45. “Μια καλή συλλογή καλών βιβλίων είναι το αληθινό πανεπιστήμιο της εποχής μας” - Thomas Carlyle

46. “Πολύ λίγα βιβλία χρειάζονται για να είναι κανείς επιστήμων και ακόμη λιγώτερα για να είναι σοφός” - Balzac Honore de

47. “Mr. O'Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. "Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus? Cervantes?" "Actually I'm looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson"He paused somberly, toying with the twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running - they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait, they will not be rushed.” - Hilary Thayer Hamann

48. “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

49. “The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.” - Elizabeth McCracken

50. “I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]” - Patrick Ness

51. “There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries” - Patrick Ness

52. “Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.” - Patrick Ness

53. “THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!” - Tom Stoppard

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

55. “Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.” - Sarah J. Maas

56. “The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.” - Lucy Dillon

57. “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

58. “Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…”"What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?”“Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

59. “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

60. “Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be. That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.” - Bernard Kops

61. “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

62. “We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library” - Carl Sagan

63. “A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” - zadie smith

64. “An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust." -page 62” - Jennifer Lee Carrell

65. “She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.” - T.E.D. Klein

66. “To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.” - Sophie Divry

67. “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

68. “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