Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations ."
"Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age."
"I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea."
"Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center."
"It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all."
"I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull."
"But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you."
"People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are."
"So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road."
"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,and dismiss whatever insults your own soul... It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women. The master knows that he is unspeakably great and that all are unspeakably great. There will soon be no more priests... They may wait awhile, perhaps a generation or two, dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place.A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man,and every man shall be his own priest."
"Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself."
"Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man."
"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."
"At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer."
"If AIG had tried to unwind their derivatives books. I don't know. It would have hit every institution in the world."
"But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision."
"When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?""
"When I sit down to write a book, I do not know where the energy and the words come from. I just sit down, and soon it is flowing through my hand and onto the paper."
"I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town-crier."
