
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti: it requires so much attention.

There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

That's what this country needs -- more books!

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It's like falling in love.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

There's no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

There is only one success: to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

That's when a woman finds herself--when she's in love. I don't care if she is old or fat or homely or prosy. She feels that little flutter under her ribs and she drops from the tree like a ripe plum.

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.

Big shots are just little shots that keep shooting.

Oh, silly woman! Leave your stove, your pots and pans and chores, even if only for one day! Come out and see the sun in the sky and the river in the distance!

Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book.

...but if you're smart you don't hold up your hand in class and ask to be called on.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career―it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too.

You sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. - Roger Mifflin

This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else.

There is only one success: To be able to spend your life in your own way.

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin