Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Alain de Botton

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

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

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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.

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

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

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.