94 Inspiring Quotes About Libraries

Libraries have long been sanctuaries for knowledge seekers, dreamers, and explorers, offering more than just rows of books. They embody a spirit of curiosity and provide a haven for inspiration and transformation. In an era where digital screens often dominate our attention, libraries remind us of the tactile pleasure of flipping through pages, the camaraderie found in shared silence, and the limitless worlds waiting to be discovered. Through the words of authors, thinkers, and visionaries, we explore 94 inspiring quotes that celebrate the magic and importance of libraries in our lives. Let their wisdom reignite your passion for these timeless institutions and the endless journeys they offer.

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

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

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

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

5. “When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.” - Joan Bauer

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

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

8. “[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

9. “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

10. “There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. ” - Scott Douglas

11. “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

12. “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

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

14. “Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.” - S.R. Ranganathan

15. “Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this--dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather--would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.” - Sheila Connolly

16. “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” - Walter Cronkite

17. “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.

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

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

20. “To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.” - Carlos María Domínguez

21. “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

22. “He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.” - Terry Pratchett

23. “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

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

25. “This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

26. “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

27. “For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]” - Nicholas A. Basbanes

28. “I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.” - John Godfrey Saxe

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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. “Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.” - James A. Michener

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

35. “(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

36. “Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head.” - Rebecca Maizel

37. “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

38. “The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. 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.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475” - Norman Cousins

39. “...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

40. “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

41. “Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.” - Neil Gaiman

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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.” - Seth Godin

47. “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

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

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

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

51. “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

52. “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

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

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

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

56. “When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.” - Piers Anthony

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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)

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

62. “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

63. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.” - Catherynne M. Valente

64. “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

65. “Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.” - Laura Bush

66. “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

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

68. “The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.” - George Orwell

69. “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

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

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

72. “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

73. “The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.” - Eric Burns

74. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” - Andrew Carnegie

75. “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

76. “I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them."[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171]” - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement” - J. Patrick Lewis

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.” - Larry Stone

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism."[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]” - Neil Gaiman

91. “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

92. “I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.” - Nick Hornby

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

94. “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