Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

Alfred Hitchcock

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

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

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

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.

It is commonly said that every human being has in him the material for one good book, which is true in the same sense as it is true that every block of stone contains a statue.

Books—oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings." "I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

The creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

Michel de Montaigne

Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness.

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.

William Shakespeare

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

G. K. Chesterton

Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that the mind was the disposer and cause of all... and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both.

In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.

Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

Abraham Lincoln

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

G. K. Chesterton