Buy books first quote

A social post this month pushed a centuries-old Erasmus line back into circulation, and the replies turned it into a small defense of buying books and protecting reading time. (goodreads.com) (en.wikiquote.org) The line most often shared online is: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes,” attributed to Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist and scholar of the early 1500s. Wikiquote ties the modern version to a later translation and points to a 1500 letter in which Erasmus wrote that he would buy Greek authors first and clothes after. (en.wikiquote.org) (philosophyparadise.com) That gap between the polished quote and the surviving letter matters because the internet usually spreads the shorter line, not the archival wording. Goodreads shows the quote has drawn more than 8,700 likes on its site alone, a sign of how firmly it has entered modern book culture. (goodreads.com) (en.wikiquote.org) The reaction also landed at a moment when reading is common but uneven in the United States. Pew Research Center said last week that 75% of U.S. adults read all or part of at least one book in the previous 12 months, based on an October 2025 survey of 8,046 adults. (pewresearch.org) Print still leads the way people read. Pew found 64% of U.S. adults read a print book in the prior year, compared with 31% who read an e-book and 26% who listened to an audiobook. (pewresearch.org) At the same time, heavy reading is concentrated in a minority of people. YouGov reported in January 2026 that the median American read two books in 2025, while 40% said they read none and 19% said they read 10 or more. (yougov.com) Researchers have also measured a longer slide in reading for pleasure. A 2025 iScience study using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2023 found the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. (sciencedirect.com) (bls.gov) Studies of digital distraction help explain why readers in that conversation kept praising “ad-free” time with a book. A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology found a negative effect of attentional interference in networked environments on reading comprehension, and a separate study reported that on-screen distractions such as advertisements and social media notifications can fragment text processing. (frontiersin.org) (eric.ed.gov) That helps explain why an old line about choosing books over clothes keeps resurfacing in 2026. In a media environment built around alerts, feeds, and ads, the appeal in the replies was not only the quote’s joke about priorities, but the older promise that a book offers one thing at a time. (en.wikiquote.org) (frontiersin.org)