Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Believers and doers are what we need - faithful librarians who are humble in the presence of books.... To be in a library is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of library's unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in our neophites.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.