Top 500 Book Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The Library is a wilderness of books.”

— Henry David Thoreau

252. “Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.”

— George Bernard Shaw

253. “The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”

— Roald Dahl

254. “As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”

— Toni Morrison

255. “True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.”

— Swami Vivekananda

256. “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.”

— Mother Teresa

257. “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”

— C. S. Lewis

258. “When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

259. “No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

260. “Tulsidas’s Ramayana is a notable book because it is informed with the spirit of purity, pity and piety.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

261. “Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate.”

— Alexander Pope

262. “Books are not about messages. I write to understand my soul.”

— Paulo Coelho

263. “About Newton: Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort.”

— Albert Einstein

264. “In reading, one should notice and fondle details.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

265. “Drink deeply from good books.”

— John Wooden

266. “A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.”

— Thomas Carlyle

267. “Books were safer than other people anyway.”

— Neil Gaiman

268. “Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.”

— Ulysses S. Grant

269. “Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”

— Shel Silverstein

270. “Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.”

— Louisa May Alcott

271. “I would not dare so dishonor my Creator’s name by attaching it to this filthy book.”

— Thomas Paine

272. “E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.”

— Anne Lamott

273. “We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

— Ray Bradbury

274. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

— George Orwell

275. “The Bible in the memory is better than the Bible in the book case.”

— Charles H. Spurgeon

276. “I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.”

— Neil Gaiman

277. “You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.”

— Leonard Ravenhill

278. “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”

— Roald Dahl

279. “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the ‘limit text’ of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.”

— Terence McKenna

280. “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

281. “I’m the world ‘Guinness Book of Records’ holder of 1,749 hugs in one hour. My arms fell off.”

— Nick Vujicic

282. “Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.”

— Charles Darwin

283. “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.”

— Jack Kerouac

284. “Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

— Hilary Mantel

285. “Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.”

— Erin Morgenstern

286. “Books are the curse of the human race.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

287. “Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”

— William Faulkner

288. “A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

289. “When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

290. “Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.”

— William Feather

291. “I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

— Jane Austen

292. “I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.”

— Stephen Hawking

293. “Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”

— Thomas Fuller

294. “When you’re old enough to write a book for children, by then you’ll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you’re an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.”

— Roald Dahl

295. “When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.”

— Nora Ephron

296. “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.”

— John Steinbeck

297. “I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”

— Neil Gaiman

298. “But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”

— Stephen King

299. “Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

300. “Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.”

— Haruki Murakami