Top 500 Book Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “A girl in the convertible is worth five in the phone book.”

— Mae West

352. “BTW A 24 week old embryo is not a human being. You’re not a human being until you’re in my phone book.”

— Bill Hicks

353. “Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.”

— Isabel Allende

354. “The world is a better place when you smile.”

— Nicholas Sparks

355. “Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?”

— C.G. Jung

356. “The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”

— Oscar Wilde

357. “I am simply a ‘book drunkard.’ Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.”

— L.M. Montgomery

358. “I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.”

— Ernest Hemingway

359. “The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print.”

— Mark Twain

360. “In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”

— Ray Bradbury

361. “I’ve read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I’ve made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.”

— Donald Trump

362. “Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.”

— C.G. Jung

363. “Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.”

— Nelson Mandela

364. “We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.”

— John Keats

365. “A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls.”

— Hermann Hesse

366. “I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

— Neil Gaiman

367. “My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I’m quite prone to such bouts of deplorability – take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

— Brandon Sanderson

368. “Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.”

— Swami Vivekananda

369. “Books simply help you to see what is already within your self. That’s what enlightenment is all about.”

— Robin S. Sharma

370. “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”

— Ernest Hemingway

371. “Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.”

— Stephen King

372. “Books are cool, but knowledge without mileage doesn’t mean anything to me.”

— Henry Rollins

373. “In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.”

— Barack Obama

374. “Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don’t you agree?”

— Christopher Paolini

375. “We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.”

— Quintilian

376. “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

— John Steinbeck

377. “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.”

— C. S. Lewis

378. “She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she’d checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.”

— Nicholas Sparks

379. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

— C. S. Lewis

380. “May books and nature be their early joy!”

— William Wordsworth

381. “Untouchability, I hold, is a sin, if Bhagavadgita is one of our Divine Books.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

382. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

— Virginia Woolf

383. “Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”

— Carl Sagan

384. “There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

385. “What better book can there be than the book of humanity.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

386. “The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology.”

— Thomas Paine

387. “It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn’t want to move around very much.”

— Brandon Sanderson

388. “The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.”

— Terry Pratchett

389. “The Book of Mormon is to be feasted upon, not nibbled.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

390. “Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.”

— Audrey Hepburn

391. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.”

— Henry David Thoreau

392. “I love reading – inspirational books, leadership books, biographies. I exercise a lot and put on my audio book. Even If you would offer me a million dollars for my iPod I wouldn’t give it to you, because I have some great things on it.”

— Robin S. Sharma

393. “The gospel we preach must not be just something we hear from men or read from books or even conceived through our meditation. Unless it is delivered to us by God, it can serve no spiritual utility.”

— Watchman Nee

394. “He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

395. “Knowledge of the Absolute depends upon no book, nor upon anything; it is absolute in itself. No amount of study will give this knowledge; is not theory, it is realization. Cleanse the dust from the mirror, purify your own mind, and in a flash you know that you are Brahman.”

— Swami Vivekananda

396. “Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

397. “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

398. “The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list’ning to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails.”

— Alexander Pope

399. “I grew up kissing books and bread.”

— Salman Rushdie

400. “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

— Ray Bradbury