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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"It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so-not to speak of boots."
"We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal."
"Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure."
"A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents."
"In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe."
"I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful." But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible.— Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable."
"It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation."
"Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before."
"Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time."
"What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?"
". . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . ."
"Any book is a self-help guide if you can take something from it."
"If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community."
"In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back."
"My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children."
"The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me."
"You don't have to donate money, it can be clothes, or books, or mediavl supplies. So there's so much that can be done [for refugees], the most difficult thing is that first step that decision to do something."
"I have been a fan of comic books since childhood."
"But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man."
"There are, however, those who have called the book [The Kite Runner] divisive and objected to some of the issues raised in the book, namely racism, discrimination, ethnic inequality etc."
