Your library is your sanctuary filled with the objects you love most in the world – your books. A great book collection can take a lifetime complete, and best of all, it is completely unique and entirely your own. Some refer to the rooms that hold their book collections as their personal “heaven” or “cocoon,” and others consider collecting books the only “reasonable lifestyle.” Here are some quotes on book collecting that will speak to the soul of any bibliophile:

“A man’s library is a sort of harem, and tender readers have a great prudency in showing their books to a stranger.” – Emerson (“Society and Solitude”)

“Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.” – Cicero

“Books will grow in a house like a vine if you provide something to support them.” – Billy Baldwin (quoted in the New York Times, September 5, 1985)

“The collecting instinct reaches its apotheosis in books.” – Lawrence Clark Powell (“Three Loves Have I” in A Passion for Books, 1958)

“A house without books is like a house without windows.” – Horace Mann

“If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.” – John Ruskin (cited in the Harper’s Book of Quotations)

“If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.” – Will Durant

“Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity… I have not read every one, nor is it likely that I will – but to know that I might!” – Sven Birkerts (An Artificial Wilderness, 1987)

“My house is a library with living rooms attached.” – Bernard Berenson

“…Of all…impassioned pursuits, there is none more abundant in joys, noble, healthy and pure, than book-hunting.” – Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 1950)

“A room without books is as a body without a soul.” – Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury (1834-1913)

“It is often said that books take up a lot of room. As a matter of fact a bookcase 3 feet 6 inches high by 3 feet 6 inches wide will take 180 books of assorted sizes, and this bookcase need not project more than 7 inches from the wall.” – Lionel McColvin (“How to Use Books”)

“We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their reading access, reassurance.” – A.E. Newton (1863-1940)

“What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.” – Elizabeth Arnim

“When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” – Jane Austen

“Wherever there are books to be hunted is heaven for the bibliophile and doubly heaven in that his territories are in themselves beautiful to be remembered many years after with singular delight.” – Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 1950)

“A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if to the character of a collector he adds – or tries to add – the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.” – Sir William Osler

“I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you can give me in the way of decoration which the highest art can supply.” – John Bright

“…The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity, and this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish…” – A. Edward Newton

“I love to own books. Though I read few books twice, I have filled every shelf in my house with books, have had more shelves made and filled those too. My books surround me like a cocoon. When I run my finger along the backs of my books they feel like the ribcage of an old familiar lover. Visit my shelves and you will learn much about me.” – Joe Bennett, Bedside Lovers

“A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.” – Pablo Neruda

“My home is where my books are.” – Ellen Thompson

“But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!” – Eugene Field (Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac)

“The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!” – William Gladstone

“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.” – Charles Lamb

“People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mystics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness.” – Joe Queenan (One for the Books, p. 26)

“My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason… There are no books in my collection that I cannot link with a particular time and place… A few hundred books I have kept because they are classics that I constantly reread; another hundred or so were given to me by friends I hold in high regard. The rest remind me of something.” – Joe Queenan (One for the Books, p. 228, 231)

“In the bookcases round the wall are many that I love, but in the center of the room, and easiest to get at, are those that I love the best – the very elect among my favorites. They change from time to time as I get older, and with years some that are in the bookcaes come here, and some that here go into the bookcases, and some are removed altogether, and are placed on certain shelves… reserved for those that have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and from whence they seldom, if ever, return.” – Elizabeth Arnim

“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.” – E.M. Forster

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” – Arthur Conan Doyle