Last Updated: October 5, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
A library is a collection of sources of information and similar resources made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. It provides physical or digital access to material and may be a physical building or room, a virtual space, or both.
Libraries are essential in the process of giving citizens access to knowledge. In times of the internet, everyone can visit a library without leaving home. It’s just a matter of opening a library website, and you can borrow an ebook and ask the librarian an online question.
But even today, libraries are an indispensable resource in our hyper-connected world. They provide a safe learning and discovery space for anyone seeking it. If you love books, chances are you love libraries too. Libraries are places where anything is possible; you can travel the world, uncover hidden mysteries, and even heal a broken heart, all inside the walls of a library.
We’ve collected 120 of my favorite quotes about libraries and librarians from famous authors, actors, politicians, and other prominent figures in this post. These quotes epitomize the magic of the humble library and remind me just how valuable these sacred spaces are.
Thought-Provoking Library Quotes
Top 10 Library Quotes
“You can get lost in any library, no matter the size. But the more lost you are, the more things you’ll find.” – Millie Florence
“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” – Ray Bradbury
“With a public library card in your hand, you have access to the Internet and a world of opportunities.” – Bill Gates
“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
“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
“When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian.” – American Library Association
“When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.” – Joan Bauer
“When in doubt go to the library.” – J.K. Rowling
“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” – Walter Cronkite
“What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists.” – Archibald MacLeish
What is Library?
“A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.” – Norman Cousins
“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.” – Alan M. Dershowitz
“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.” – Germaine Greer
“A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it… It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.” – Neil Gaiman
“A library is a house of hope. It’s a place where we all, whatever our situation, can feed our ideas and develop our dreams.” – Doug Wilhelm
“A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.” – Cornelia Funke
Funny Library Quotes
“My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything.” – Peter Golkin
“My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.” – Bill Russell
“Libraries: Here is where people, one frequently finds, lower their voices, and raise their minds.” – Richard Armour
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” – Anne Herbert
“Libraries were full of ideas – perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.” – Sarah J. Maas
“Libraries that are true to their core mission fill three critical needs in this brave new non-print world.” – Jorge Luis Borges
“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” – Virginia Woolf
“I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.” – Laura Bush
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library.” – Jorge Luis Borges
“Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card.” – Marc Brown
“Great libraries have always looked to both the future and the past.” – Laura Shapiro
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.” – Neil Gaiman
“Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.” – Oprah Winfrey
“Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.” – John Braine
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities.” – R. David Lankes
“An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.” – Stephen Fry
“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.” – Shelby Foote
“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” – Jo Godwin
Silence In The Library Quotes
“The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.” – Alberto Manguel
“The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance.” – Libba Bray
“The first thing my family did when we moved was join the local church. The second was to go to the library and get library cards.” – John Grisham
“Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.” – Patrick Ness
“Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.” – Neil Gaiman
“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley
“Reading brings us unknown friends.” – Honoré Balzac
“A Trained Librarian is a Powerful Search Engine With a Heart.” – Sarah McIntyre
“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
“A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.” – Vicki Myron
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” – Neil Gaiman in Coraline
“Everything you need for better future and success has already been written… All you have to do is go to the library.” – Henri Frederic Amiel
“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
“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
“Every child in America should have access to a well-stocked school library.” – Laura Bush
Library Quotes For Students
“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
“When I got my library card, that was when my life began.” – Rita Mae Brown
“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.” – Harold Howe
“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
“Libraries are our friends.” – Neil Gaiman
“Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world.” – Lauren Ward
“Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.” – Laura Bush
“Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.” – Willard Scott
“Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.” – Patrick Ness
“Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.” – Spider Robinson
“Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.” – Charles Medawar
“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.” – Richard Powers
“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
“In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.” – Linton Weeks
“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
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” – Frank Zappa
“If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.” – Peter Singer
Library Book Quotes
“You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world… Arm yourself!” – Russell T. Davies
“You don’t spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.” – Lemony Snicket
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
“What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.” – Aaron Swartz
“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.” – B. F. Skinner
“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 website.” – ―Sergey Brin
“My alma mater was books, a good library.” – Malcolm X
“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.” – Alberto Manguel
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard
“To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.” – Carlos María Domínguez
“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
“If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.” – Cornelia Funke
“I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.” – John le Carre
“I read the booklet from cover to cover like it was a wonderful meal and I was a starving man. I devoured every word.” – Jeff VanderMeer
“I love to read. I could read for days and never stop. I use to be such a bookworm. I would barely look up to notice much of anything.” – Jennifer Loren
“I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.” – J.K. Rowling
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.” – Jorge Luis Borges
“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” – Lemony Snicket
“A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.” – Martin Farquhar Tupper
“A book is a drop in the ocean of knowledge, in the ocean of knowledge every reader is drowned in the thoughts of what to read?” – Luffina Lourduraj
“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” – Maya Angelou
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.” – Charles William Eliot
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen
“The contents of a library can take you further than your own imagination could begin to imagine. To open a book is to open your mind.” – Amberle Cianne
Library Of Souls Quotes
“The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.” – Paula Poundstone
“The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.” – E. L. Doctorow
“The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.” – Lemony Snicket
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
“The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.” – Albert Einstein
“The most important asset of any library goes home at night – the library staff.” – Timothy Healy
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
“Quality cataloging takes time and money. Without a good catalog, there is no library.” – Colin Bitter
“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
“Public libraries are the heart and soul of any community. They are a place to read and think and browse and dream.” – Mary McNear
“Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.” – Lady Bird Johnson
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow
“Only librarians like to search, Everyone else likes to find.” – Roy Tennant
“Nothing is pleasanter than exploring a library.” – Walter Savage Landor
“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
“Libraries raised me.” – Ray Bradbury
“Libraries are the future of reading.” – Courtney Milan
“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark… In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.” – Germaine Greer
“Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.”
“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
“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.
