Today’s thoughts are on books.  Books, Books, and more Books. Here are a few quotes I’ve collected over the years about books:

“A little library, growing every [day]/year, is an honorable part of a man’s history.  It is a man’s duty to have books.”    Henry Ward Beecher

“I cannot live without books.”    Thomas Jefferson

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”    Henry Ward Beecher

“When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” Erasmus

“If you cannot read all your books…peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from them the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are.  Let them be your friends; let them be your acquaintances.”    Winston Churchill

“It is a good plan to have a book with you at all times.  If you are presently without [one], hurry to the nearest bookstore, and buy one of mine.”    O. Wendell Holmes

“Books are not dead things, but do preserve, as in a vial, the present extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”    John Milton

“Books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else’s mindset, so that for a while least, you look at the world from different eyes.  That can be an uncomfortable experience.  But it can also be really enlightening.”    Ann Morgan, from ” My Year of Reading a Book From Every Country in the World.” (Ted Talk)

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”    Cassandra Clare, from The Infernal Devices