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.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

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

A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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?

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

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

Dejan Stojanovic

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

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

We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

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

Gaston Bachelard

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

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

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

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.

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.

If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.

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

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.

A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.