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 think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood."
"I don't read books. I like to read newspapers and magazines, but I've never learnt to enjoy books or novels."
"Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery."
"Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start."
"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."
"A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about."
"I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books."
"She wanted happily ever after more than he could possibly know. She wanted forever. Problem was, she just wasn’t sure she believed in it anymore. It was why she clung to her fiction so much. She immersed herself in books because there she could be anyone and it was easy to believe in love and happily ever after"
"We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation."
"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
"The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense."
"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves."
"Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain."
"I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists."
"Books are immortal sons deifying their sires."
"Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries"
"By God ye shall be called to account for your doings!"
"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight"
"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
"... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump."
