He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.

I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

Borrowers of books-those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.

A great library contains the diary of the human race.