Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it."

Pliny the Younger

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

Dreams are…illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

Bill Manders: I, too, am pro life but I'm also pro choice, do you understand what I say when I mean that.
Sharron Angle: I'm pro responsible choice. There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kinds of good choices.
Bill Manders: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?
Sharron Angle: Not in my book.
Bill Manders: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?
Sharron Angle: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.

Thomas Love Peacock

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

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?

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, But his books were read'.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

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

Mary Ellen Chase

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

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

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

In that part of the book of my memory before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, "Incipit Vita Nova [The new life begins]."

Dante Alighieri

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you.

Thomas Jefferson

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.