Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent.—Shaftesbury, Characteristics.
It's mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.—O. W. Holmes, Poet at the Breakfast Table.
I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny—'nullum esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte prodesset.'—Gibbon, Autobiography.
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.—Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
While you converse with lords and dukes,
I have their betters here, my books;
Fixed in an elbow chair at ease
I choose companions as I please.
I'd rather have one single shelf
Than all my friends, except yourself.
For, after all that can be said,
Our best companions are the dead.
Sheridan to Swift.
We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the asking?—Lowell, Speech at Chelsea.
On all sides are we not driven to the conclusion that of all things which men can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books? For, indeed, is it not verily the highest act of man's faculty that produces a book? It is the thought of man. The true thaumaturgic virtue by which man marks all things whatever. All that he does and brings to pass is the vesture of a book.—Carlyle, Hero Worship.
Yet it is just
That here in memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man,
...
That I should here assert their rights, assert
Their honours, and should, once for all, pronounce
Their benediction, speak of them as powers
For ever to be hallowed; only less
For what we are and what we may become
Than Nature's self, which is the breath of God,
Or His pure word by miracle revealed.
Wordsworth, Prelude.