78 Inspiring Library Quotes

In the age of rapid technological advancement, libraries remain cherished sanctuaries of knowledge, discovery, and inspiration. Whether you're a lifelong book lover or a curious newcomer, the wisdom housed within a library's walls is bound to captivate your heart and mind. We've gathered a curated collection of the top 78 inspiring library quotes to celebrate these timeless institutions. Each quote shines a light on the unique magic that libraries hold, offering inspiration, reflection, and a renewed appreciation for the written word. Dive in and let these quotes remind you of the transformative power of libraries.

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

2. “An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.” - Stephen Fry

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

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

5. “In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.” - Linton Weeks

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

7. “If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

8. “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

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

10. “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

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

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

13. “There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.” - Patrick Rothfuss

14. “Did the men steal the papers?" Reynie asked, fearing her response.No, because they are fools," Sophie said bitterly. "They demanded to see the papers, and when I did not answer fast enough -- they were very frightening, you see -- they hurt me so that I was not awake. . . . When I opened my eyes they were still trying to find the papers. They did not understand how we organize the library, you see. They were angry and creating a bad mess. . . . The police were coming and the men decided they must leave. I shouted at them as they left: 'It is a free and public library! All you had to do was ask!” - Trenton Lee Stewart

15. “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

16. “anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.” - Virginia Woolf

17. “Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” - Thomas Jefferson

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

19. “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

20. “Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.” - Patricia A. McKillip

21. “From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.” - Alberto Manguel

22. “People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.” - Terry Pratchett

23. “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

24. “About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page."Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff.""It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write."Books are boring," James said as he wrote."They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books.” - Laura Whitcomb

25. “Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.” - Sidney Sheldon

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

27. “Libraries raised me.” - Ray Bradbury

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

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

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

31. “(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section)I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.” - Nick Hornby

32. “...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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.” - Cecil B. DeMille

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its essence, but that it was there.” - David Drake

39. “A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]” - E.B. White

40. “Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.” - Robin Sloan

41. “Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

42. “It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011” - Russell Grandinetti

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

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

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

46. “Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.” - Marilyn Johnson

47. “Βιβλιοθήκη είναι σκέψη σε κατάψυξη” - Viscount Herbert Samuel

48. “Μια βιβλιοθήκη είναι ένα νοσοκομείο του πνεύματος” - Αιγυπτιακό γνωμικό

49. “Τι ευλαβείς που είναι μερικοί εκ των ‘καθώς πρέπει’ ανθρώπων, που θεωρούν καθήκον των να έχουν, και έχουν, και βιβλιοθήκην; Ουδέποτε ταράσσουν την κόνιν των νεκρών” - Δ. Γρ. Καμπούρογλου

50. “Βρίσκω την τηλεόραση πολύ εκπαιδευτική. Κάθε φορά που κάποιος ανοίγει τη συσκευή, πηγαίνω στο άλλο δωμάτιο και διαβάζω ένα βιβλίο.” - Marx Groucho

51. “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

52. “Book lovers love books!" her mother announced. "There's romance about the books- even having them seems to have a kind of excitement."from Mr. Linden's Library by Walter Dean Myers” - Chris Van Allsburg

53. “Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]” - Isaac Asimov

54. “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

55. “If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.” - James Billington

56. “My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.” - Craig Silverstein (Director of Technology, Google.com)

57. “Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.” - Willard Scott

58. “The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.” - James Wood

59. “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

60. “Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.” - John McPhee

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

62. “On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer's Salons, call them, franchise chain.” - Stephen Minkin

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

64. “Great. He was a hottie, a good kisser, and a literature buff. God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn’t know, that wasn’t taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line. Suddenly, I found myself thinking back to Atonement—you know, the scene in the book where the two main characters have sex in the library? Even though Chloe said doing it against bookshelves would be really uncomfortable (and she’d probably know), it was still a fantasy of mine. Like, what’s more romantic than a quiet place full of books? But I shouldn’t have been thinking about my library fantasies. Especially while I was staring at Cash. In the middle of a library.” - Kody Keplinger

65. “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

66. “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

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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “I was pretty sure I'd just had a nerdgasm.” - Nicole Peeler

72. “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

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

74. “...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.” - Jim C. Hines

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

76. “I like libraries. It's a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.” - Jackson Pearce

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

78. “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