Quotes & Sayings About Value Of Books

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. — D.H. Lawrence

I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders ... Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information.
The result won't be a library without books
it'll be a library without value. — Clifford Stoll

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development. — Marcel Proust

Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did. — Bart D. Ehrman

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value. — James Lee Burke

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority. — Edward Gibbon

I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books. — Chuck Palahniuk

I know my comfort zone and I know what my strong points are and my first love was always music. I'm a huge cinema fan. I was taking my time; I got offered a lot of scripts and things along the way but until Burlesque showed up at my doorstep, it really spoke to me. I have a collection of burlesque books at home that I've had for years. I've always been intrigued and fascinated with the topic, the beauty and the art of it and the comedic value of it. I think it's just a beautiful, empowering thing for women. — Christina Aguilera

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents. — Karl Marx

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value. — Zhuangzi

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A similar attitude causes some people to spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, 'I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself.' That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors? — John F. MacArthur Jr.

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being-that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal. — David Foster Wallace

But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Memory: Recognizing the value of an alert mind and an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently. — Bruce Lee

Most of the books that I've written have been focused on, sort of, the individual, and sort of, either a voice, a personal voice, or a kind of transforming event where they step forward to fight for something they value. — Caroline Kennedy

One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you'll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against. — Joshua Rothman

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read - with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature. — Andrew Clements

If a book isn't at least somewhat polarizing, it didn't say anything of value.
[Blog entry - November 1, 2014] — Ilona Andrews

I'm not into writing many more books or more pages. My goal is to increase the value of each sentence I write. And for that, I have to just erase my past and bring only forward what matches the new me, things I can easily rewrite and adapt to my new perspective. — Robin Sacredfire

But everything of value about me is in my books. — V.S. Naipaul

Books were seen as a waste of time. What was the point, unless you were reading for information? To lose oneself in a book was to be slightly wacky, a little greedy and ultimately slothful. There was no value. You couldn't make money from reading a book. A book did not clean bathrooms and waxed floors. It did not put the garden in. You couldn't have a conversation while reading. It was arrogant and alienated others. In short, those who read were wasteful and haughty and incapable of living in the real world. They were dreamers. — David Bergen

I'm not saying don't do the work you got, but instead of this two hours of watching TV at the hotel lobby or this three hours of sitting under the pier and reading comic books or worrying about what you're doing ... what value do you have? Can you read? There are people out there who can't read - go read to them. — Andy Andrews

The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value. — Sheridan Hay

Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value. — Arthur Schopenhauer

You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn't lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls of the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written. And there's another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new; I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature. — Yann Martel

There was a pair of books, one by Hemingway, another by Thomas Wolfe. Each had written a long inscription to the other. A knowledgeable dealer had to inform the unfortunate owner who had just paid a pretty penny for them that the inscriptions were not authentic, and that the value was not what he had hoped. Later, another dealer discovered that they were spectacular forgeries: Wolfe had written Hemingway's inscription, and Hemingway, Wolfe's. — Allison Hoover Bartlett

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us. — Egerton Brydges

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. — Cormac McCarthy

Judge not the value of a friend by the number of boy- or girlfriends they helped you get. But by the number of books they've recommended to you. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.
And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author's part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,
living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. As for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden. — Clarence C. Day

For me, my core genius lies in the area of teaching and motivating. I love to do it, I do it well, and people report that they get great value from it. Another core genius is compiling and writing books. Along with my co-author Mark Victor Hansen and others, I have written, co-authored, compiled and edited more than 200 books. — Jack Canfield

Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?"
"From you, Pappa", I said.
"From me? I don't know any of this".
"You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble."
- Isaac Asimov (Isaak Yudovich Ozimov). It's been a good life. — Isaac Asimov

Books of value are just like people of value-they try only to elevate others, to help them to rise and to grow. — Victor J. Banis

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. — Carl Sagan

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous. — David Nicholls

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. — Alberto Manguel

What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath. — Abbas Kiarostami

He who doesn't see the essence of books shall surely be ruled by those who find and value the real essence of books. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. — Susan Sontag

The value of universal literacy is of course questionable in a society that practices the strictest form of censorship. — Victor Andres Triay

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films. — Christopher McQuarrie

Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly. — James Fenimore Cooper

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking 'worldviewishly' is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which 'worldview thinkers' are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking. — Andy Crouch

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity
their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought. — Edith Wharton

Learning locked in mildewed books is of little use to anyone and therefore of no value unless it can be used. — L. Ron Hubbard

This principle is taught in Scripture: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). In other words, we learn to be loving because we are loved. Grace must come from the outside for us to be able to develop it inside. The opposite side of this truth is that we can't love when we aren't loved. And, taking the thinking further, we can't value or treasure our souls when they haven't been valued or treasured. — Henry Cloud

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader. — Will Self

One of the most important things in my childhood were the new books that came in. I feel sorry for kids today who have so many other options like television that they may not value books as much as they could enjoy them. — Jean Fritz

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel. — Matt Haig

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can. — John Green

A real value of a talk is not how it goes but what it leaves in your memory, which is one reason perhaps why dialogues in books are always so boring to read. — H.G.Wells

Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art. — Pietro Aretino

When you think about the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books, the current fossil fuel companies, the last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War, — Chris Hayes

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance. — Robin Sacredfire

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief ... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.
[Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001] — Philip Pullman

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed. — William Temple

I really should not be so willing to interpret my own books as I seem to be this evening. But the blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are. I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I'm speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant - and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter. If we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life - hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before. — Marilynne Robinson

To this day, my mom's unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years, she's worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as 'Sami.' Along with 500 miles of shelved books, her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself. — Hoda Kotb

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] — Philip Pullman

Some encounter me in person, know I am a writer, and don't trust the value of my words. Some encounter my books, know me later, and don't trust the value of my friendship. Both doubt themselves. — Robin Sacredfire

Exegetical commentaries on the books of the Bible come in all shapes and sizes. Harold Hoehner's new volume on Ephesians has both a distinctive shape and a monumental size. Its value lies in its attention to detail and its full discussion of all relevant and disputed points. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students. Not all Hoehner's conclusions will command consent, but he has produced a stout and readable volume that all will turn to for guidance and help. — Ralph P. Martin

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare? — Dejan Stojanovic

Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?" "Fuck no," Bull said. "I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can't ever balance the books." "Sounds — James S.A. Corey

From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets-anything that might throw light upon the past had been systemically altered. — George Orwell

In the wake of the British army's burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection.42 There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson's hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library "for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price."43,44 They formed the core of the new Library of Congress. — Jon Meacham

I think romance is maligned in large part because at first glance, love seems so pedestrian. It's all around us. It's in books and songs and movies and on billboards, so how could it really hold literary value? But what people tend to forget is that the search for love - for the simple idea that there is someone out there who will see us for who we are and accept us isn't trite. It's a huge part of our lives. And it's an enormous part of our dreams.
There are so many fabulous romances out there - there's something for everyone. I really believe that. And I believe that most of the people who look down their noses at the genre haven't ever read a romance novel. I think that if they did, they'd be really surprised by how good great romance can be. — Sarah MacLean

A book is not just paper and ink, it's a world full of dreams, imaginations, knowledge, awakening, emboldening and a lot, lot more invaluable treasures. Gift your child a book - introduce them to the joy of reading. — Jyoti Arora

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling. — George Lucas

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain
from cosmology to psychology to economics
has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. — Sam Harris

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. — Joshua Foer

A man should begin with his own times. He should become acquainted first of all with the world in which he is living and participating. He should not be afraid of reading too much or too little. He should take his reading as he does his food or his exercise. The good reader will gravitate to the good books. He will discover from his contemporaries what is inspiring or fecundating, or merely enjoyable, in past literature. He should have the pleasure of making these discoveries on his own, in his own way. What has worth, charm, beauty, wisdom, cannot be lost or forgotten. But things can lose all value, all charm and appeal, if one is dragged to them by the scalp. — Henry Miller

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. — Lev Grossman

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification. — Alice Munro

The value of experience, real or imagined, is that is shows us how to - or how NOT to - live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life's sorrows and joys ...
and all the great books I was reading - were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books ARE experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. i had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much. — Nina Sankovitch

I highly recommend re-reading good personal development books. Rarely can we read a book once and internalized all of the value from that book. Achieving mastery in any area requires repetition - being exposed to certain ideas, strategies, or techniques over and over again, until they become ingrained in your subconscious mind. — Hal Elrod

I try to satisfy the desires that people have to have their books personalized. That's a value, or feature, of bibliophilia that may vanish. How do you get your e-book signed? The idea of people standing in line to get my signature in their book, it's hard to turn them away. — Chris Van Allsburg

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children's toys
and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence. — Jacques Bonnet

I grew up on welfare in the South Bronx; I had a very tough upbringing in that neighborhood. Reading books like The Four Agreements, A Return to Love, and The Power of Now helped me to overcome many internal battles. Had I not worked on myself, put value in myself, I would not have the loving and supportive people that I have right now in my life, including my husband and children — Andrea Navedo

I can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read. — Colson Whitehead

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none. — Virginia Woolf

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?"
This would normally have riled me ... but I had come to think of her as Dr. Spock from Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical creature, at least with regards to her feelings for animals. Like Spock, though, I knew there were one or two things that stirred her, so I gave an honest reply.
" ... to be honest, it doesn't matter. No economy will suffer, nobody will go hungry, no diseases will be spawned. Yet there will never be a way to place a value on what we have lost. Future children will see rhinos only in books and wonder how we let them go so easily. It would be like lighting a fire in the Louvre and watching the Mona Lisa burn. Most people would think 'What a pity' and leave it at that while only a few wept — Peter Allison

Back home, I went to my closet and pulled out the old engineer's transit case stored there. When we were kids, Emma and I had found it in the attic, dusty and empty, and the leather strap used to carry it had a small cut in it. The tag on the top of the wooden-hinged lid read Circa 1907. It was mostly weatherproof and offered plenty of room for the things I valued - like books. — Charles Martin

I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature. — Jonathan Kozol

For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition. — Paul Auster

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths. — Italo Calvino

[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself. — William Faulkner

Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of "free" information could erode economic interdependencies between nations. — Jaron Lanier

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions. — Alan Jacobs

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one ... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money ... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it. — James Clavell

My books have sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years. — Charles Darwin