When things gets too crazy and you need to escape you can pick up a book and forget about the world around you. Books can take us away from the cares of this world for a while at least, it can take you to a world you could never get too except thru a book.

Books are valuable record of our heritage and history. Yes, we have the internet, but even with the vast amount of information stored in the internet not everything is there. Books are still here to give us information, entertain us and inspire us, books gives us so many things, books are knowledge and with knowledge comes wisdom.

Here are some gems of thoughts from various writer, poets and great men and women who have shared inspiring wisdom about books.

• The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. -James Bryce

• Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. -Charles W. Eliot

• A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. -Chinese Proverb

• We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. - B. F. Skinner

• Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Mark twain

• Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen. - Samuel Johnson

• Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. -Henry David Thoreau

• Some books leave us free and some books make us free. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• I cannot live without books. -Thomas Jefferson

• A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools. - Thomas Jefferson

• Books are humanity in spirit - Barbara Tuchman

• It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. -Oscar Wilde

• A house without books is like a room without windows. -Heinrich Mann

• A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum -- of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold. - Henry Miller

• Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. -Barbara Tuchman

• Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. -James Russell Lowell

• For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. -Francis Bacon

• She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. - Louisa May Alcott

• All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hours and the books of all times. -James Ruskin

• There are worse crimes than burning books.One of them is not reading them. - Brodsky Joseph

• Of writing many books there is no end. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• 'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?' - Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

• A truly great books should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. - Robertson Davies (In Grant, The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies)

• The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries - Rene Descartes (Discours de la Methode, 1637)

• The book is the world's most patient medium. - Northrop Frye (The Scholar in Society, Film, 1984)

• For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. - Ernest Hemingway (Speech for the presentation of the Nobel Prize-1954)