“Books … hold within them the gathered wisdom of humanity, the collected knowledge of the world's thinkers, the amusement and excitement built up by the imaginations of brilliant people. Books contain humor, beauty, wit, emotion, thought, and, indeed, all of life. Life without books is empty.”
Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990), pp. 74-75
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Isaac Asimov 303
American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992Related quotes

as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.

Part of his public message upon arrival on his second visit to America (19 May 1932).
General sources

The Preface to the American edition of Fated to be Free (1875)
Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 11
Context: How much of what we do is free will, and how much is programmed in our genes? Why is each people so narrow that it believes that it, and it alone, has all the answers?
In religion, is there but one road to salvation? Or are there many, all equally good, all going in the same general direction?
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

Speech, Saskatchewan Legislature, February 17, 1954.

p. 26 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b325850;view=1up;seq=32
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)