Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows

A great quote by Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1888), on books. I though some of you might appreciate it.

“Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved étagére or sideboard.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows.

No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the moans to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them ! Children learn to read by being in the presence of .books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Let us congratulate the poor that, in our day, books are so cheap that a man may every year add a hundred volumes to his library for the price which his tobacco and his beer would cost him. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is pot a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”

– Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1888.