“In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book.”
Words on being presented with a Bible, as reported in the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle (8 September 1864)
1860s
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Abraham Lincoln 618
16th President of the United States 1809–1865Related quotes

1880s, Garfield's Words (1882)

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

“No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.”

Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.
Letter to Peter Augustus Jay, April 9, 1784.
1780s

“Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.”
Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Duas coisas só me deu o Destino: uns livros de contabilidade e o dom de sonhar.

Sam Harris, “Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence.” The Ethical Culture Society and the Center for Inquiry, New York, NY, November 16, 2005 (broadcast on CSPAN-2)
2000s

“The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.”

"Self-Culture", an address in Boston (September 1838) http://www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm
Context: I have insisted on our own activity as essential to our progress; but we were not made to live or advance alone. Society is as needful to us as air or food. A child doomed to utter loneliness, growing up without sight or sound of human beings, would not put forth equal power with many brutes; and a man, never brought into contact with minds superior to his own, will probably run one and the same dull round of thought and action to the end of llfe.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.