Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

René Descartes

Elie Wiesel

Nicolaus Copernicus

Raymond Chandler

Samuel Johnson

Diana, Princess of Wales

Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

René Descartes

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.

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.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Edward Dahlberg

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Joyce Carol Oates

Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes V. Jensen

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

Lawrence Clark Powell

Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.

Dejan Stojanovic

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

Wisława Szymborska

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot in front of the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Gaston Bachelard

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

William Kingdon Clifford

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

Henry Morton Stanley

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?