Book Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Raymond Chandler

Nicolaus Copernicus

Diana, Princess of Wales

Samuel Johnson

Groucho Marx

Ezra Pound

Elie Wiesel

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

Raymond Chandler

I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that's got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.

Diana, Princess of Wales

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

René Descartes

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.

Nicolaus Copernicus

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.

Thomas Love Peacock

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Lawrence Clark Powell

A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain and eyes like burning anthracite — that was Dan'l Webster in his prime. And the biggest case he argued never got written down in the books, for he argued it against the devil, nip and tuck and no holds barred. And this is the way I used to hear it told.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.

Aleister Crowley

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

Earth and Sky, Woods and Fields, Lakes and Rivers, the Mountain and the Sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Anthony Burgess

The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

In... the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

George Meredith

You win in battles with the timing in the Void born of the timing of cunning by knowing the enemies' timing, and this using a timing which the enemy does not expect.
All the five books are chiefly concerned with timing. You must train sufficiently to appreciate all this.

Miyamoto Musashi

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

Amos Bronson Alcott