Quotes about books

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritu

Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.]

Books are the shells of wisdom, which are split open for the pearls of character.

Is a self help or personal development book ruining your life?

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of

Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his

Camomille: Fallible men write books. God writes in sunlight and rivers and planets. Isn't the Universe a good book? I trust it above the printed kind.

The world’s greatest achievers have been those who have always stayed focussed on their goals and have been consistent in their efforts.

The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.

Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.

Old words are reborn with new faces.

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not.""I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I thi

Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There's more of wisdom in it.

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn." (1872)

The world of books is the wealth of being.

...books give a man ideas, they make him want to live.

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.

…We feel different things. We like different things. It’s like they say with books, no two people ever read the same book. It’s the same with music, yo.

Let your love for books grow, as your confidence grows too.

A book is like life, there are only so many chapters.

Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writ

I could recognise his soul in mine as much as he could find me in his. Our sole existences seemed to have been for this very moment when nothing else mattered.

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.

Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!

Imagination is a gift given to us from God and each one of us use it differently.

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

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

Once you’ve read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.

It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.

Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Truths are dangerous," he said."Then why are you writing them in a book?""To catch them between the pages," said Teddy, "and trap them before they disappear.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already da

It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books

I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

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.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. 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.

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.

V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.

It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don

My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.

If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality.

Ability, experience and books have solution for all the problems.

If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.

No crime is a means to an end. No crime can be rationalized.

If one thousand of you participate in the murder of one child, then one thousand of you are a thousand times guilty.

You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.

From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.

Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root,

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crow

I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.