'Please to walk in, Sir.'--SOUTHEY, _Life_.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of
books than a king who did not love reading.--MACAULAY.

Our books ... do not our hearts hug them, and quiet
themselves in them even more than in God?--BAXTER'S _Saint's
Rest_.

It is our duty to live among books.--NEWMAN, _Tracts for the
Times, No. 2_.

What lovely things books are!--BUCKLE, _Life by Huth_.

(Query) Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations
be not found in books?--BERKELEY, _Querist_.

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