Book quotes

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.
Mark Twain

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
Mark Twain

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
Abraham Lincoln

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
Thomas Jefferson

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
Thomas Jefferson

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
Thomas Jefferson

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
Benjamin Franklin

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Oscar Wilde

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Every burned book enlightens the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Ernest Hemingway

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
Ernest Hemingway

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
Ernest Hemingway

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau

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

You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.
Confucius

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
Henry David Thoreau

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
Groucho Marx

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Groucho Marx

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!
Mitch Hedberg

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
Robert Frost

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
Steven Wright

The book you don't read won't help.
Jim Rohn

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.
Jim Rohn

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
Dale Carnegie

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.
Erma Bombeck


There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
Walt Whitman

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Walt Whitman

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.
Mike Tyson

Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
Mike Tyson

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You're not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I'm going to emerge then submerge.
George W. Bush

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write.
George W. Bush

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.
Chuck Palahniuk

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
Emily Dickinson

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
Anne Frank

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Saint Augustine

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
Dr. Seuss

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
Fran Lebowitz

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
Fran Lebowitz

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
Stephen Hawking

There is no need to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Samuel Johnson

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
Samuel Johnson

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Aldous Huxley

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.
Lord Byron

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
William Faulkner

You might be a redneck if... the blue book value of your truck goes up and down depending on how much gas it has in it.
Jeff Foxworthy

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Marcel Proust

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
Charles Darwin

I don't go by the rule book... I lead from the heart, not the head.
Princess Diana

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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Ambrose Bierce

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
Lewis Carroll

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.
Lady Gaga

Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.
Bill Maher

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

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock

There's no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.
Dwight L. Moody

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry A. Kissinger

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.
George Burns

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

Beware of the person of one book.
Thomas Aquinas

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
Toni Morrison

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
Toni Morrison