Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.

I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.

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.

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.

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.

In... the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

George Meredith

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, 'The hell with that. I'm out there. I'm exposed with this book.'

William Julius Wilson

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

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

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

Mary Ellen Chase

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

Roberto Bolaño

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

The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

Thomas Jefferson