=Bartholin=. "Without books God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in Cimmerian darkness."
=Beaconsfield, Lord=. "The idea that human happiness is dependent on the cultivation of the mind and on the discovery of truth is, next to the conviction of our immortality, the idea the most full of consolation to man; for the cultivation of the mind has no limits, and truth is the only thing that is eternal."
"Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream. Its base rests on the primeval earth, its crest is lost in the shadowy splendor of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven."
=Beecher, Henry Ward=. "A book is good company. It seems to enter the memory, and to hover in a silvery transformation there until the outward book is but a body, and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory like a spirit."
"Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows...."
=Bright, John=. "What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past time."
=Brooks, Phillips=. "Is it not a new England for a child to be born in since Shakspeare gathered up the centuries and told the story of humanity up to his time? Will not Carlyle and Tennyson make the man who begins to live from them the 'heir of all ages' which have distilled their richness into the books of the sage and the singer of the nineteenth century?"
"When we gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul forward, headlong into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- 'Tis then we get the right good from a book."
=Bruyère=. "When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by; it is good, and made by a good workman."
=Bury, Richard de=. "You, O Books! are golden urns in which manna is laid up; rocks flowing with honey, or rather, indeed, honeycombs; udders most copiously yielding the milk of life, store-rooms ever full; the four-streamed river of Paradise, where the human mind is fed, and the arid intellect moistened and watered; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand."