Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two thirds of the people of the earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

Albert Einstein

Man's excellence lies in his readiness to let others live and lay down his own life. As he progresses, his food also changes for the better. He has the capacity to grow still further. There have been many more discoveries after Darwin's. The book which you have been reading seems to be an old one. Whether it is old or new, the "Principle of the greatest good of the greatest number," or "survival of the fittest" is false.

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

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie

Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should never be confronted with facts but should live in a pure, autonomous world where they are compared only with other words. When you say, 'the cat is a carnivorous animal,' you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is 'metaphysics' and is on this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Bertrand Russell

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

Ernest Hemingway

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection (the title of my book), which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.

To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—

Emily Dickinson

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Emily Dickinson

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

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.

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 paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book — it makes a very poor doorstop.

Alfred Hitchcock

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

When I was crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons. I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.

You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

Ernest Hemingway

I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brain...& therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.

Books are true friends that will never flatter nor dissemble: be you but true to yourself,... and you shall need no other comfort.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

The ancient books are for authors; the new ones, for readers.

The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.

Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.

Johannes Kepler