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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"Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one."
"I didn't read a serious book until I was 19."
"I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step."
"Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time."
"The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything."
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales."
"This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit."
"Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading."
"Get away from all books and forms and let your soul see its Self. "We are deluded and maddened by books", Shri Krishna declares."
"The Vedas give information on various subjects. They have come together and form one book. And in later times, when other subjects were separated from religion - when astronomy and astrology were taken out of religion - these subjects, being connected with the Vedas and being ancient, were considered very holy."
"I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web."
"I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing."
"The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art."
"When you read a book, and it's really, really beautiful, you're so engaged you forget to breathe. If you're in a car accident, and everything moves slowly, you can be shocked into the present. The past and the future disappear."
"A completed book exists in its entirety, although we humans read it in a time sequence from the beginning to the end. Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leave the others to write themselves, So God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather his creativity has been seen as permeating equally all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge."
"Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself! (from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)"
"If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion."
"But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroes, and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm."
"If it's a good book, anyone will read it. I'm totally unashamed about still reading things I loved in my childhood."
