A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life. It is not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling and needing repair. But like a spiritual tree. There it stands and yields its precious fruit from year to year and from age to age. The art of writing, and of printing as a sequence to it, is really the most wonderful thing in the world.
Books are the soul of actions.
The only audible, articulate voice of the accomplished facts of the past. The men of antiquity are dead. Their fleets and armies have disappeared. Their cities are ruins. Their temples are dust.