Books Quotes

Best Books sayings - browse and share beautiful high-quality picture quotes about Books.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

'Tis easy to write epigrams nicely but to write a book is hard

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

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

George Orwell

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me it would defeat the purpose.

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.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Ernest Hemingway

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels, and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

The real war will never get in the books.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Through the media of films, books, music and the behavior of elders, young minds are excited and aroused into indulgences.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

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.

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.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie

Until I became a published writer I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject... they would have spoiled my natural style, made me observe caution, would have hedged me with rules.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

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

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree, the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

My books are like water, those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Mark Twain

We cannot learn men from books.

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

John Steinbeck

As far as I knew, white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

Maya Angelou

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand, I teach in order to learn.

Many books require no thought from those who read them and for a very simple reason, they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

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

Emily Dickinson

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

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

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

All humanity is passion, without passion religion, history, novels, art, would be ineffectual.

Honore de Balzac

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.

It was not very wonderful that Catherine... should prefer cricket base ball... to books.

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.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends, they are the sole instruments of registering perpetuating and transmitting thought.

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

We do not need to proselytise, either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be and he who studies men will know how they are.

The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I've been asked this question so many times - 'do you feel you need to write a book for adults?' No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

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.

Books like friends should be few and well chosen. Like friends too we should return to them again and again, for like true friends they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.

All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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

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

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

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

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.

To a poet silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.

Robert A. Heinlein

One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it.

Books are the money of Literature but only the counters of Science.

Thomas Huxley

At night when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

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

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

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

I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true if once understood.

Max Muller

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees books, in the running brooks sermons, in stones and good in everything.

By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him but you will not rid men's minds of him.

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

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher

If a secret history of books could be written and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting and dull tales excite the reader!

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

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Never lend books for no one ever returns them, the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

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.

And they write innumerable books, being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation and dodging his emptiness.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.

Patrick Henry

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not everyone that can read in it.

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

Outside books we avoid colorful characters.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

Anatole France

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

Beware of the person of one book.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them.

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

That is sad, until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

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.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

There was a time when the world acted on books, now books act on the world.

Joseph Joubert

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of lying.

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

Dwight L. Moody

I have become infected now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually ultimately I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

I'm not really book-smart.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress and then it becomes a master and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops, or the shelves of holiday houses, to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.

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.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

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

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

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

Books open your mind, broaden your mind and strengthen you as nothing else can.

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

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

Books that you carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand are most useful after all.

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

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

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

In true education anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

A book that is shut is but a block.

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.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man, or a fair man of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

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

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only but now and then I come across a passage perhaps only a phrase which has a meaning for me and it becomes part of me.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

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

As an old reporter we have a few secrets and the first thing is we try the phone book.

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

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

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

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

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

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

I don't read 'chick lit ' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

One of Edward's Mistresses was Jane Shore who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading.

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.

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.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours kindle it at home communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.

Voltaire

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.

My room for books and study, or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular, to see what would happen, was at the end of a hall.

At some point I would like to write a book and other things but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

I don't think I've read any of the books that have been written about me.

Books will speak plain when counselors blanch.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

One whose knowledge is confined to books, and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge, nor wealth, when the need for them arises.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service, we lay them aside.

Read much but not many books.

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