Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

I don't care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

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

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

There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

Charles William Eliot

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Roberto Bolaño

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

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Thurgood Marshall

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.

Isaac Mayer Wise

For books are more than books, they are the life,
The very heart and core of ages past.
The reason why men lived, and worked, and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us?
Is this the great poet whose works so content us?
This Goldsmith's fine feast, who has written fine books?
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks.

Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.