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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"There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves."
"The world has always been like a comic book world to me! What's happened is that communications got better and better, so now with cell-phones we can be in touch with people half a globe away."
"I would not be well-known if I had just used my gift to make money for me. The moment I started to teach others - you teach people to fish - I think that's why my book Rich Dad, Poor Dad became an international bestseller, and things like this."
"The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season."
"My library is an archive of longings."
"True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action."
"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."
"Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves."
"I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness."
"As a kid, I drew cartoon characters and comic book heroes. Spiderman and the X-Men were my favorites."
"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."
"Books ought to have good endings.How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?"
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there."
"The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street."
"The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world."
"I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history."
"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
"But if you miss it, you will next be confronted with the angry deities, ... threatening you and barring your passage ... because you turned a deaf ear to the saving truths of religion. All these forms are strange to you, ... they terrify you, ... and yet it is you who have created them. Do not give in to your fright, ... flee them not! They are but ... the contents of your own mind... If at this point you should manage to understand that, ... and you will find yourself in a paradise among the angels."
"If you miss the bus, miss the train, you’d be left behind. So everyone says, let’s get on the train, let’s get on the bus and go faster and get rich... I just didn’t like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music."
"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."
