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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"A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word."
"When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it."
"The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living."
"In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked."
"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."
"No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on."
"I'm no different from anybody else. If I don't have a card, I can't check out these books."
"One day, when I own a house, I'll keep a library full of books. Books are different from other possessions-they're more like friends."
"Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, fifty books per year, and will guarantee your success."
"You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it."
"There are great books in this world and great worlds in books."
"If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited."
"I failed, many times in my life. One failure that I always remember was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. Many years later, I watched HuffPost come alive"
"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."
"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle them, and, as it were, fondle them. Let them fall open where they will. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas."
"Every man is a book in which God himself writes."
"When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet."
"I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made."
"I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket."
