Top 500 Book Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “After me, the Revolution – or, rather the ideas which formed it – will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.”

— Napoleon

202. “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.”

— Blaise Pascal

203. “When all your favorite preachers are gone, and all their books forgotten, you will have your Bible. Master it. MASTER IT!”

— John Piper

204. “And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”

— Toni Morrison

205. “I had this desire to see the world. I couldn’t see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that’s why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.”

— George R.R. Martin

206. “Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

207. “May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.”

— Thomas Carlyle

208. “Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.”

— Nora Ephron

209. “Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”

— Neil Gaiman

210. “Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.”

— Thomas Carlyle

211. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

212. “Good books are the warehouses of ideas.”

— H. G. Wells

213. “You cannot open a book without learning something.”

— Confucius

214. “My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.”

— Isaac Newton

215. “We need to eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”

— Barack Obama

216. “We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”

— T. S. Eliot

217. “Man’s actions are the picture book of his creeds.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

218. “I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read, because he is like a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.”

— Conor McGregor

219. “I don’t go by the rule book. I lead from the heart, not the head.”

— Princess Diana

220. “So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.”

— Stephen Hawking

221. “Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens.”

— Tony DeLiso

222. “Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.”

— Albert Einstein

223. “I think of a child’s mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.”

— Walt Disney

224. “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

— Mark Twain

225. “I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands.”

— Seneca the Younger

226. “Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

227. “A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.”

— Ray Bradbury

228. “They judge me like a picture book, by the colors, like they forgot to read.”

— Lana Del Rey

229. “I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.”

— Benjamin Franklin

230. “And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam’s nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!”

— Terry Pratchett

231. “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”

— Louisa May Alcott

232. “The intention of this Book of The Law is perfectly simple. Whatever your sexual predilections may be, you are free, by the Law of Thelema, to the the star you are, to go your own way rejoicing.”

— Aleister Crowley

233. “A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.”

— Jane Austen

234. “Don’t read a book and be a follower; read a book and be a student.”

— Jim Rohn

235. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

— Terry Pratchett

236. “It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.”

— Douglas Adams

237. “Ordinary people simply don’t know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.”

— Anne Frank

238. “Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”

— Stephen King

239. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

— C. S. Lewis

240. “Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.”

— Walt Whitman

241. “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

242. “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

— Aldous Huxley

243. “With a book he was regardless of time.”

— Jane Austen

244. “Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.”

— Horace

245. “I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?”

— Franz Kafka

246. “Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.”

— Bill Gates

247. “Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

248. “The purpose of the Bible? Salvation. God’s highest passion is to get His children home. His book, the Bible, describes His plan of salvation. The purpose of the Bible is to proclaim god’s plan and passion to save His children.”

— Max Lucado

249. “I want to Live! Not Die, Not Hide, LIVE!”

— Margaret Peterson Haddix

250. “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

— Ray Bradbury