“What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared to what we spend on our horses?”

“What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do”

“I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them.”

“A thing of worth is what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.”

“If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.”

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.”

“Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.”