The Duty of Owning Books (1859)
Context: Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate! To spend several days in a friend’s house and hunger for something to read, while you are treading on costly carpets, sitting upon luxurious chairs and sleeping upon down, is as if one were bribing your body for the sake of cheating your mind.
“Let your house
be spacious more than splendid, and be books
And busts your most conspicuous furniture.”
Source: Savonarola (1881), Lorenzo de' Medici in Act I, sc. i; p. 6.
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Alfred Austin 56
British writer and poet 1835–1913Related quotes
“Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”
The Duty of Owning Books (1859)
Context: Men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, I find the reason why he has cheap carpets and very plain furniture to be that he may purchase books, he rises at once in my esteem. Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Attributed to Einstein in Treasury of the Christian Faith https://books.google.com/books?id=Ll4wAAAAYAAJ&q=%22shabby+clothes%22+%22shoddy+furniture%22&dq=%22shabby+clothes%22+%22shoddy+furniture%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiS04TynqDLAhUO8GMKHUYICMkQ6AEINTAA (1949), and subsequently repeated in other books. No original source where Einstein supposedly said this has been located, and it is absent from authoritative sources such as Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein.
Disputed
22
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)
“Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.”
Quoted in Ashton Applewhite; Tripp Evans, Andrew Frothingham (2003). And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker. Macmillan, p. 283. ISBN 0312307446.
“Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 96
Letter to Alexander Donald (7 February 1788)
1780s
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson
“No furniture so charming as books.”
Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)
Source: A memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith