Henry Ward Beecher Book Quotations

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.

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

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Books are the true metempsychosis,--they are the symbol and presage of immortality. The dead men are scattered, and none shall find them. Behold they are here! they do but sleep.

A library is but the soul's burial ground; it is the land of shadows. Yet one is impressed with the thought, the labor, and the struggle, represented in this vast catacomb of books. Who could dream, by the placid waters that issue from the level mouths of brooks into the lake, all the plunges, the whirls, the divisions, and foaming rushes that had brought them down to the tranquil exit? And who can guess through what channels of disturbance, and experiences of sorrow, the heart passed that has emptied into this Dead Sea of books?

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a mentor, a teacher, a guidepost, a counsellor.

The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave.

There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

Each book has a secret history of ways and means.

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.

That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.

A book is a garden; A book is an orchard; A book is a storehouse; A book is a party. It is company by the way; it is a counselor; it is a multitude of counselors.