Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside book — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I was one of those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book."
"I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book."
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?"
"We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things."
"As the 2012 elections approach the finish line, the chatter among columnists and political reporters is about upcoming books that take readers inside the campaigns, cutting-edge efforts to micro-target voters on Internet social applications, the enormous money flowing through super-PACs, and extreme political polarization."
"We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author."
"As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them."
"All governments, Books, customs, buildings, railways, ships, and all the stark realities that men have made, Are but imagination's utterances."
"No two persons ever read the same book."
"And they will ask thee of the spirit. Say: The spirit proceedeth at my Lord's command; but of knowledge, only a little is given to you."
"The self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself, within yourself."
"Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book."
"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
"I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him."
"If God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to contemplate his works, my book can wait for a hundred."
"One who believes all of a book would be better off without books"
"Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon."
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly."
"Good books are the warehouses of ideas."
