Quotes about books
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“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 (1983) American author

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Of all I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man's life upon this earth — and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

Life, Wisdom, Truth, Flowers

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Cute, Flowers, Freedom, Happiness

“The dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.”

Gordon Korman book No More Dead Dogs

Source: No More Dead Dogs

Dogs

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: How Reading Changed My Life

Home, Training

“Life isn't a book. There's no guarantee of a happy ending.”

Kristin Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

Life, Happiness

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Reading

“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

George Orwell Why I Write

Source: Why I Write

Lie, Art, Drawing

“I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

Source: Palestine

Reading

“If you have time to chatter,
Read books.

If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.

If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.

If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot.”

Nanao Sakaki (1923–2008) Japanese poet

Mountain, Singing, Time, Reading

“It was a particularly good evening to begin a book.”

Tove Jansson book The Summer Book

Source: The Summer Book

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“It is my belief that books are living things…. And as living things, they need to be protected.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Men, Reading, Past

“There are essentially two things that will make you wise -- the books you read and the people you meet.”

Jack Canfield (1944) American writer

People, Reading

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Hate

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Understanding, Parting

“The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales—I broke Elvis's records, I broke Beatles records—the minute it became the all-time best-selling album in the history of the Guinness Book of World Records, overnight they called me a freak. They called me a homosexual. They called me a child molester. They said I bleached my skin. They made everything to turn the public against me.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (9 July 2002)

World, History, Time

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)

History, Thinking, Reality, Learning

“When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”

Tom Morello (1964) American guitarist and singer-songwriter

http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/articles/guitaryear.htm

People

“Learning is to a man as the leaves and branches are to a tree, and it can be said that he should not be without it. Learning is not only reading books, however, but is rather something that we study to integrate with our own way of life.
One who is born into the house of a warrior, regardless of his rank or class, first acquaints himself with a man of military feats and achievements in loyalty, and, listening to just one of his dictums each day, will in a month know 30 precepts. Needless to say, if in a year he learns 300 precepts, at the end of that time he will be much the better.
Thus, a man can divide his mind into three parts: he should throw out those thoughts that are evil, take up those ideas that are good, and become intimate with his own wisdom… I would honor and call wise the man who penetrates this principle, though he lacks the knowledge of a single Chinese character. As for those who are learned in other matters, I would avoid them regardless of how deep their knowledge might be. That is how shallow and untalented this monk is.”

Takeda Shingen (1521–1573) Japanese daimyo of the Sengoku period

William Scott Wilson, ‎Gregory Lee. Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors, 1982. p 95

Life, Wisdom, Way, Idea

“The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Charles Dickens (1939)

Truth, Education, Law, Business

“In that book which is
My memory…
On the first page
That is the chapter when
I first met you
Appear the words…
Here begins a new life.”

Dante Alighieri book Vita Nuova

Source: La Vita Nuova (1293), Chapter I, opening lines (as reported in The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell)

Life, Appearance, Memory

“The whole idea of what happens when you read a book, I find absolutely stunning. Here's some product of a tree, little black squiggles on it, you open it up, an inside your head is the voice of someone speaking, who may have been dead 3000 years, and there he is talking directly to you, what a magical thing that is.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (full interview, May 20th, 1977)
Others

Idea, Tree, Reading, Dead

“I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"Women’s Hero Journey : An Interview With Lois McMaster Bujold on Paladin of Souls by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net (June 2009)

“This book raises issues that might not be apparent from the table of contents.
It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humanness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or "enclosed society," with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.”

Karl Popper book The Open Society and Its Enemies

Introduction; part of this has sometimes been paraphrased : Our civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Birth, Freedom

“Welcome to my library! Ever since my high school days, books and magazines have been to my mind what friends are in the flesh. Each and every one of these books and articles-- a fraction of the 12,000 volumes that I share my house with-- has contributed to expanding my dream.”

Patch Adams (1945) Physician, activist, diplomat, author

Source: House Calls: How we can all heal the world one visit at a time (1998), p. 129

School, Dreams, Housing

“So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it is, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, I think. That the key to why things change is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? And that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen, or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that [art book] as opposed to this [transparency of some filaments]. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, the stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff [art book] is easier to take, isn't it? Understandable. Got people in it. This, [transparency] scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they are to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge, that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by helped towards that knowledge I don't mean give everybody a computer and say: help yourself. Where would you even start? No, I mean trying to find ways to translate the knowledge. To teach us to ask the right questions. See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb and blind. And I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything. Because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you're thinking, right now, what do I ask for? Ask yourself, if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That's where to start.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Life, People, World, Art

“THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Lecture: "Off the Time Track" (June 1952) as quoted in Journal of Scientology issue 18-G, reprinted in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology Vol. 1, p. 418.

People, Lie, Way

“Let every man abide in the art or employment wherein he was called. And for their labor they may receive all necessary things, except money. … Let none of the brothers, wherever he may be or whithersoever he may go, carry or receive money or coin in any manner, or cause it to be received, either for clothing, or for books, or as the price of any labor, or indeed for any reason, except on account of the manifest necessity of the sick brothers. For we ought not to have more use and esteem of money and coin than of stones. And the devil seeks to blind those who desire or value it more than stones. Let us therefore take care lest after having left all things we lose the kingdom of heaven for such a trifle. And if we should chance to find money in any place, let us no more regard it than the dust we tread under our feet.”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order

First Rule of the Friars Minor

Money, Art, Chance, Clothes

“I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Source: Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), p. 89

Law, Fools, Nature, Tree

“He, therefore, who desires peace, should prepare for war. He who aspires to victory, should spare no pains to form his soldiers. And he who hopes for success, should fight on principle, not chance. (Book 3, Foreword)”
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui uictoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat euentus, dimicet arte, non casu.

Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus book De re militari

De Re Militari (also Epitoma Rei Militaris), Book III, "Dispositions for Action"
Variant: Si vis pacem para bellum. ("If you want peace, prepare for war.")

Pain, War, Peace, Hope

“As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books… I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

Audio Interview http://www.geekson.com/archives/archiveepisodes/2006/episode080406.htm with Geekson http://www.geekson.com in Episode 54, (4 August 2006)

Feeling

“This book… too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.”

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Prologue
The Society of Mind (1987)

Idea, Sense

“from Ahmad Shamlou's letters to his wife Ayda, the book "like the blood in my veins"”

Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) Iranian Persian poet, writer, and journalist

sourced, from his letters to his wife

“If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. So the Philosopher argues in chap. 2 of his first book of the work [Metaphisics]. And he immediately indicates what the greatest science is, namely the science which is about those things that are most knowable. But there are two senses in which things are said to be maximally knowable: either [1] because they are the ﬁrst of all things known and without them nothing else can be known; or [2] because they are what are known most certainly. In either way, however, this science is about the most knowable. Therefore, this most of all is a science and, consequently, most desirable…”
sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia". Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.

Duns Scotus (1265–1308) Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher and Catholic blessed

sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia".
Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.
Quaestiones subtilissimae de metaphysicam Aristotelis, as translated in: William A. Frank, Allan Bernard Wolter (1995) Duns Scotus, metaphysician. p. 18-19

Men, Way, Nature, Knowledge

“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 (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946)

Travel

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life, People, Way, Idea

“An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject [of the Barcelona fighting], and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Fight

“A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting, and when you are gone; attend to those things, which you think are important. You may adopt all policies you please, but how they are carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. All your books are going to be judged, praised or condemned by him. The fate of humanity is in his hands. So it might be well to pay him some attention.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

The origins of this quote are unknown. At least two sources can be traced back, but these sources date back to the 1940 years; long time after Lincon's death. Source 1: The 2003 "Masonic Historiology" from Allotter J. McKowe contains on page 55 (page 55 is dated on Jan. 11, 1944) the poem " What Is a Boy? http://books.google.de/books?id=K5CHWRttt-gC&pg=PA55&dq=desk" from an unknown author. The poem reads: :: He is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. :: He is to sit right where you are sitting and attend when you are gone to those things you think are so important. :: You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they will be carried out depends on him. :: Even if you make leagues and treaties, he will have to manage them. :: He is going to sit at your desk in the Senate, and occupy your place on the Supreme Bench. :: He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. :: He is going to move in and take over your prisons, churches, schools, universities and corporations. :: All your work is going to be judged and praised or condemned by him. :: Your reputation and your future are in his hands. :: All you work is for him, and the fate of the nations and of humanity is in his hands. Quotes about life http://www.quotesaboutlifee.com/2012/04/best-quotes-on-life-best-sayings-on.html :: So it might be well to pay him some attention. Source 2: The newspaper "The Florence Times" from Florence, Alabama (Volume 72 - Number 120) contains in its Wednesday afternoon edition from October 30, 1940 a statement from a Dr. Frank Crane. The entitled "What is a Boy?" statement http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19401030&id=yx8sAAAAIBAJ&sjid=I7oEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3738,3720511 reads: Disputed

Fate, Thinking, Dependency, Personality

“No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 175

World

“Science is never finished because the human mind only uses a small portion of its capacity, and man's exploration of his world is also limited. If we look at this tree outside whose roots search beneath the pavement for water, or a flower which sends its sweet smell to the pollinating bees, or even our own selves and the inner forces that drive us to act, we can see that we all dance to a mysterious tune, and the piper who plays this melody from an inscrutable distance—whatever name we give him—Creative Force, or God—escapes all book knowledge.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 14

God, World, Search, Flowers

“Michael Moorcock: Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever.… My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse — it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Interview in New Statesman & Society (21 April 1995), discussing her books Intercourse and Right Wing Women.

Marriage, Law, Reading, Parting

“Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)

God, Religion, Angels, Way

“Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers.”

Roger Penrose (1931) English mathematical physicist, recreational mathematician and philosopher

Interview in "Secrets of the Old One" in Berkeley Groks (16 March 2005) http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/%7Efrank/BerkeleyGroks_Penrose.htm. Context: Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers. There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that. So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. The trouble is that if I did that — and I actually didn't do it — the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future

“Between them these two books sum up our present predicament.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek and The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus, reviewed in The Observer (9 April 1944).
Context: Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

“The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight…”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

"The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions"; Collected Works 2 
Context: The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation.

History, Learning, Fight, Parting

“I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:
: By the known rules of ancient liberty.
The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison

War, Freedom, Evil, Past

“There's a little book I'm thinking of writing — "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying.”

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Russian and Soviet writer

Foma Gordeyev (1899) [also translated as The Man Who Was Afraid; the English music group Led Zeppelin would later name their record label "Swan Song".
Context: There's a little book I'm thinking of writing — "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

Thinking

“It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 12
Context: As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. … Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.

Truth, Idea, Personality

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 10
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”

Zaman Ali (1993) Pakistani philosopher

"Humanity", Ch.II "Ideologies: A way to live", Part IV

Change

“Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, Canto 1, Chapter 17, verse 36.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

1999

“That devastating omniscience! That noxious, horn-spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 1

Money, Education, Peace

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow — no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life — for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section IX
The Waves (1931)

Tree, Hate, Making love, Sun

“A pessimistic book is most likely to bring some solace to those who already have those views but who feel alone or pathological as a result. They may gain some comfort from recognizing that there are others who share their views and that these views are supported by good arguments.”

David Benatar (1966) South African philosopher

Source: The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (2017), Introduction, p. 14

Support, Feeling

“What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Diogenes Laertius

Thinking

“For religion is the book and the words within it. It is innocent from any committed action(s).”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Religion

“Reading more books will only confuse you more and you will be dreaming about success instead of becoming successful yourself.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Reading, Success, Dreams

“At school, you have geniuses who can only memorise the facts. Reading and memorising books from cover to cover, without any promise of creativity or of proposing your new idea to the world.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

World, Idea, School, Reading

“Practice is necessary. You can't learn to swim just by reading a book about swimming. Otherwise, you will continue to look for teachers at each stop.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Reading, Learning, Teachers

“Reading ideas improves,
reading stories entertains,
reading the news informs,
reading books teaches,
reading the song rhymes”

Josephs Quartzy (1999) Tanzanian actor

Source: Sweetest song I know

Reading, Idea

“You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

As quoted in Of This and Other Worlds (1982) by Walter Hooper, Preface, p. 9

Tea

“A fool may buy all the books in the world, and they will be in his library; but he will be able to read only those that he deserves to.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Source: Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.

World, Fools, Reading

“I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds

Dreams

“Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

People, Learning, Reading

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

Life, Tree, Change

“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Time

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

Search, Housing

“You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

God

“Beppu (n.)

The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page.”

Douglas Adams book The Meaning of Liff

Source: The Deeper Meaning of Liff

Reading

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1870), letter #342a of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, associate editor Theodora Ward, page 474
Source: Selected Letters

Way, Feeling, Reading

“Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Life, Reading

“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 (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

8 November 1943
Variant: 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.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)

People, Thinking

“That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Life, Change, Reading