50 Inspirational Library Quotes to Ignite Your Imagination and Love for Books

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one."

- Neil Gaiman

"My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."

- Isaac Asimov

"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

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants."

- Doris Lessing

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead."

- Caitlin Moran

"You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have—arm yourselves!"

- Russell T. Davies

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education."

- Harold Howe

"Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism."

- Neil Gaiman

"A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you."

- Alan M. Dershowitz

"The health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."

- Carl Sagan

"When in doubt, go to the library."

- J.K. Rowling

"The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history."

- Carl Thomas Rowan

"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."

- Henry Ward Beecher

"I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free."

- Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities."

- R. David Lankes

"What is the value of libraries? Through lifelong learning, libraries can and do change lives, a point that cannot be overstated."

- Michael E. Gorman

"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."

- Sidney Sheldon

"Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge."

- Patrick Ness

"Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress."

- Willard Scott

"I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Who Needs a Librarian and Cataloger When You Have Google and Internet? Well, Who Needs a Teacher When You Have Wikipedia? And, Who Needs a Doctor When You Have WebMD? Just as the Wikipedia Doesn't Replace the Teacher, and WebMD Doesn’t Replace the Doctor, In the Same Way, Google Search and Internet Doesn’t Replace the Librarian and Cataloger."

- Salman Haider

"Libraries were full of ideas – perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons."

- Sarah J. Maas

"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world."

- Rita Dove

"At the dawn of the 21st century, where knowledge is literally power, where it unlocks the gates of opportunity and success, we all have responsibilities as parents, as librarians, as educators, as politicians, and as citizens to instill in our children a love of reading so that we can give them a chance to fulfill their dreams."

- Barack Obama

"Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library."

- Henri Frederic Amiel

"Librarians are committed to promoting lifelong learning in order to create a community of well-informed individuals. Librarians are catalysts to enlightenment for their communities."

- Louise Capizzo

"You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!"

- Russell T. Davies

"The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library."

- Albert Einstein

"Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind, which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty."

- James Madison

"If you want a future of libraries, it is within you, the librarians. If you want a healthy community that seeks out knowledge, and seeks informed conversation, then advocate for it beyond your walls."

- R. David Lankes

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

- Ray Bradbury

"When I got my library card, that’s when my life began."

- Rita Mae Brown

"To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads."

- Jon Bing

"Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to Hit Refresh -- to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose. If only it were as easy as punching that little refresh button on your browser. Sure, in this age of continuous updates and always-on technologies, hitting refresh may sound quaint, but still when it's done right, when people and culture re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result."

- Satya Nadella

"When in doubt go to the library."

- J.K. Rowling

"Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture."

- Russell Banks

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

- Gandhi

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

- Steve Jobs

"A library could show you everything if you knew where to look."

- Pat Conroy

"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

- Steve Jobs

"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

"There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

- Sergey Brin

"Nothing is pleasanter than exploring a library."

- Walter Savage Landor

"I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card."

- Laura Bush

"Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague."

- Eleanor Crumblehulme

"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation."

- Walter Cronkite

"The most important asset of any library goes home at night – the library staff."

- Timothy Healy

"Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed."

- Charles Medawar

"I'm a Librarian, Librarianship is my religion, Libraries are my temple, and Catalog is my key weapon to unlock the wealth of wisdom and knowledge stored in the libraries."

- Salman Haider

"A Trained Librarian is a Powerful Search Engine With a Heart."

- Sarah McIntyre

"Classification, broadly defined, is the act of organizing the universe of knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind."

- Lois Mai Chan

"Quality cataloging takes time and money. Without a good catalog, there is no library."

- Colin Bitter

"Cutting cataloguing budgets and support year after year and retirement after retirement is hurting the library in the long run and burning out the staff that remains. We need time and resources to learn the new models and standards at the same time we do our day to day work. This is work that now takes a bit longer to do - but in the long run we are making better records. The new linked data models have the potential for revolutionizing the services and information libraries can provide for their users and keep libraries relevant in an increasingly web-based information environment."

- Donna Frederick

"Only librarians like to search, Everyone else likes to find."

- Roy Tennant

"A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture--and all of the connections among them--and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom."

- Satya Nadella

"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories."

- Ray Bradbury

"The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man."

- T.S. Eliot

"Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down."

- Toby Forward

"My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library."

- Peter Golkin

"What in the world would we do without our libraries?"

- Katharine Hepburn

"If your library is not “unsafe,” it probably isn’t doing its job."

- John Berry

"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."

- Jean-Paul Sartre

"The public library is where place and possibility meet."

- Stuart Dybek

"Paradise will be a kind of library."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"A great library contains the diary of the human race."

- George Mercer Dawson

"You build a thousand castles, a thousand sanctuaries, you are nothing; you build a library, you are everything!"

- Mehmet Murat ildan

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."

- Anne Herbert

"The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community."

- Paula Poundstone

"The most important asset of any library goes home at night—the library staff."

- Timothy Healy

"There is a hunger in this digital age to hear authors together, to participate in programs, to just be in a place, a community space."

- Carla Hayden

"When I was young, we couldn’t afford much. But, my library card was my key to the world."

- John Goodman

"A library is infinity under a roof."

- Gail Carson Levine

"Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field."

- Horace Mann

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."

- Cicero

"In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me."

- Maya Angelou

"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone."

- Jo Godwin

"I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library."

- Ray Bradbury

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."

- Frank Zappa

"I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me."

- Maya Angelou

"Cataloguing is more than merely ‘processing’ an item. Metadata gives voice to collected works, brings their form and meaning to the surface of discovery, so that collections might be found and enjoyed."

- Alissa M.

"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."

- Doris Lessing

"I've often said that the best lines of computer code are like poetry. The writer struggles to compress so much thought and feeling into the fewest lines possible while still communicating the fullness of expression."

- Satya Nadella

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.You live several lives while reading it."

- William Styron

"RDA offers libraries the potential to change significantly how bibliographic data is created and used. RDA is a standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world."

- OCLC, Librarianship Studies & Information Technology.

"Cataloging is an old-fashioned term for resource access and discovery services. With resources increasingly available and accessed electronically, description and access points are vital to discovery and use by students and faculty."

- Jan Daniel

"Quality authority work and attention to authority work by everyone working in the database is ESSENTIAL to the future of library linked data."

- B. Iseminger

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian."

- American Library Association

"Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul."

- Library at Thebes, inscription over the door

"I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy."

- Malala Yousafzai

"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."

- Thomas Jefferson

"Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world."

- Lauren Ward

"It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell."

- Jarrett J. Krosoczka

"Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development."

- Alan Bennett

"My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way."

- Anne Lamott

"That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library."

- Aphra Behn

"As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself."

- Arthur Schopenhauer

"A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life."

- Norman Cousins

"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book."

- Samuel Johnson

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."

- Groucho Marx

"A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it."

- Arthur Conan Doyle

"When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."

- Isaac Asimov

"If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research."

- Alan Dundes

"As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic."

- James McGreevey

"I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian's quiet smile as I'd bring back one stack and exchange it for another."

- Victoria Hanley

"What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists."

- Archibald MacLeish

"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim."

- Linton Weeks

"I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation."

- Lupe Fiasco

"I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don't belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs."

- Brian Selznick

"It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development."

- Noam Chomsky

"The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing."

- Barry Eisler

"When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me."

- James Carville

"The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It's a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and it's hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona."

- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

"When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it."

- Dallas Willard

"to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog."

- Sandra Cisneros

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."

- Stephen Fry

"London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really."

- David Attenborough

"Everything started with my mom. When I was five, she asked me if I wanted to sign up for soccer, but I had some pretty wild contract demands. 'I'll only play if you're my coach.' So my mom went to the library and brought home a bunch of books on how to coach soccer, and that was it. She was my first manager."

- Lindsey Horan

"A library is thought in cold storage."

- Herbert Samuel

"I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories."

- Hedy Lamarr

"In Liverpool, where I live, we have a brilliant library which has been refurbished, and I like going there."

- Shaun Evans

"The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community."

- Aaron Swartz

"I wanted to sail when I was in grammar school and well remember memorizing the names of the sails from the Merriam-Webster's ponderous dictionary in the library. Now I am actually at sea - as a passenger, of course, but at sea nevertheless - and bound for Ecuador."

- Jim Elliot

"A library book, I imagine, is a happy book."

- Cornelia Funke

"Dynasty was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than waiting around like a library book waiting to be loaned out."

- Joan Collins

"As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books."

- Cheech Marin

"So he said 'I'm going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.' I thought 'That's a turn-up for the books.'"

- Tommy Cooper

"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?"

- Lily Tomlin