Beecher, Henry Ward. "A book is good company. It seems to enter the memory, and to hover in a silvery transformation there until the outward book is but a body, and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory like a spirit."
"Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows...."
Bright, John. "What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past time."
Brooks, Phillips. "Is it not a new England for a child to be born in since Shakspeare gathered up the centuries and told the story of humanity up to his time? Will not Carlyle and Tennyson make the man who begins to live from them the 'heir of all ages' which have distilled their richness into the books of the sage and the singer of the nineteenth century?"
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.
"When we gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul forward, headlong into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth—
'Tis then we get the right good from a book."
Bruyère. "When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by; it is good, and made by a good workman."
Bury, Richard de. "You, O Books! are golden urns in which manna is laid up; rocks flowing with honey, or rather, indeed, honeycombs; udders most copiously yielding the milk of life, store-rooms ever full; the four-streamed river of Paradise, where the human mind is fed, and the arid intellect moistened and watered; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand."
"In books we find the dead, as it were, living.... The truth written in a book ... enters the chamber of intellect, reposes itself upon the couch of memory, and there congenerates the eternal truth of the mind."
Carlyle. "Evermore is Wisdom the highest of conquests to every son of Adam,—nay, in a large sense, the one conquest; and the precept to every one of us is ever, 'Above all thy gettings get understanding.'"