Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.

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

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

The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

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

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Katherine Mansfield

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Anthony Trollope

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.

Anna Garlin Spencer

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Flannery O'Connor

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

Amos Bronson Alcott

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his death, whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

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

Anthony Burgess

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

You cannot write for children... They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

William Ellery Channing

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Stephen Vizinczey

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

Lawrence Clark Powell

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

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry,
wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only
to manslaughter and bawdry.