Top 500 Book Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.”

— Roald Dahl

402. “The abundance of books is distraction.”

— Seneca the Younger

403. “Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.”

— Walt Whitman

404. “That’s how it is with books, isn’t it: They’re not in a hurry. They’ll wait for you till you’re ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.”

— Charles Bukowski

405. “Take away the cross of Christ, and the Bible is a dark book.”

— J. C. Ryle

406. “As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.”

— Thomas Paine

407. “He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends.”

— Victor Hugo

408. “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

409. “Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.”

— Ernest Hemingway

410. “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

411. “Adventure books are my personal favorites. ‘The Endurance,’ a story about Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctica expedition, or ‘Into Thin Air,’ Jon Krakauer’s personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.”

— Dean Karnazes

412. “You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I’m talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”

— Richard Dawkins

413. “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

414. “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

415. “It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

— Charles Bukowski

416. “Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.”

— Richard Dawkins

417. “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

418. “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them? -Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book, to baseball commissioner Bud Selig about lagging baseball attendance Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”

— Yogi Berra

419. “If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.”

— George Orwell

420. “I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.”

— Neil Gaiman

421. “This book was written in those long hours I spent waiting for my wife to get dressed to go out. And if she had never gotten dressed at all this book would never have been written.”

— Groucho Marx

422. “I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.”

— Angelina Jolie

423. “I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.”

— Louisa May Alcott

424. “If God did not want us to understand the book of Revelation, He would not have given it to us at all.”

— D.L. Moody

425. “Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

426. “Like books and black lives – albums still matter. Tonight and always.”

— Prince

427. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

428. “One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.”

— E. M. Forster

429. “Writing is alone, but I don’t think it’s lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they’re writing their book, and I think they’ll say no.”

— Margaret Atwood

430. “Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

431. “Therefore we say that a lying Spirit has been in the mouth of the writers of the books of the Bible.”

— Thomas Paine

432. “As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through our words.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

433. “Preposition: An enormously versatile part of grammar, as in ‘What made you pick this book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?’”

— Winston Churchill

434. “I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.”

— Umberto Eco

435. “How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul !”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

436. “Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”

— Fulton J. Sheen

437. “Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”

— Stephen King

438. “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

439. “The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than from its opponents.”

— Leonard Ravenhill

440. “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.”

— Ernest Hemingway

441. “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

— John Steinbeck

442. “If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.”

— Anne Frank

443. “Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

— Neil Gaiman

444. “Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.”

— René Descartes

445. “But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

446. “A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look.”

— Robert Frost

447. “I don’t condemn and I don’t convert. I’ve been searching through books and bibles to find what this life is worth, and I’ve made up my mind: Love is my religion. You can take it or leave it, and you don’t have to believe it. Love is my religion.”

— Ziggy Marley

448. “I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.”

— Dolly Parton

449. “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

— Woody Allen

450. “A lot of things have been thrown at me in life, and I’ve got through it all without a rule book, taking it one day at a time.”

— Yoko Ono