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 would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life." Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me."
"No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into."
"I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful."
"And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe."
"One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction."
"If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer."
"Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond."
"The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book."
"I think of a child's mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly."
"Do you think that civilization advances because of things written in books? Not a bit of what is written in books ever got there until after the thought of it happened in someone's mind. Someone first had to collect it from space, or recollect it from its electrical pattern to which he (or she) had been attuned. The book is but a record of what has already happened."
"I have a sign on my door. I look at it every single day of the week. The sign says, "Attitude is everything, so pick a good one." You need a very strong internal knowing. For instance, when I sat down to write the book The Power of Intention, I had a very strong internal knowing that I call thinking from the end."
"I would model well-being by presenting myself as a high-energy person who loves what I am doing and who is thrilled to be able to offer books, tapes, and products designed to make people feel good. I would explain that they are in a store filled with this kind of energy and that creating such a space is exactly why I got into the business in the first place. If you want to feel good, then my store is the place you should visit on a regular basis. I would stay very informed about what's out there and make sure I carry many things with very high energy."
"It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound."
"One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome."
"Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."
"It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000."
"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."
"Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'"
"Within the book and volume of thy brain."
