We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

John Lubbock (1834–1913), later 1st Baron Avebury, was a Victorian banker, scientist, and Liberal politician who wrote popular essays promoting education, self-improvement, and especially the value of reading. The line reflects a common theme in his writings and speeches on books and libraries: that reading collapses distance and time, allowing an ordinary person to encounter other places, peoples, and eras without travel. It fits the late-19th-century British culture of “improving” literature and the expansion of public libraries, in which Lubbock was an influential advocate and a prominent public voice.

The remark celebrates books as a form of imaginative and intellectual travel. Lubbock suggests that physical location is not the limit of one’s experience: through reading, a person can range across the world—geographically, historically, and culturally—while remaining at home. The library becomes a gateway to “all quarters of the earth,” implying both breadth of knowledge and a democratizing promise: access to books grants access to the wider world. The sentence also carries a quiet argument for disciplined leisure—time spent reading is not withdrawal from life but an expansion of it.