Wise Quotes about Books

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

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

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this,
but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.
- Bono

Read the best books first,
or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
- Henry David Thoreau

Books serve to show a man
that those original thoughts of his
aren't very new at all.
- Abraham Lincoln

Books are the treasured wealth of the world
and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
- Henry David Thoreau

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person
walks in the woods and listens carefully,
he can learn more than what is in books,
for they speak with the voice of God.
- George Washington Carver

We do not need to proselytize
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.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

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

The man who does not read good books
has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
- Mark Twain

Each age, it is found, must write its own books;
or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations...
The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts.
They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
- Winston Churchill

The book of life is filled with incoherent riddles.
Life's true lessons are inscribed in a corner of the margin.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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

The real lessons from the book of life
are inscribed in a corner of the margin.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains,
but the thought which it suggests;
just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones
but in the echoes of our hearts.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Lessons of the Book of Life are
Writ Small in its Margins.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Life is a Book of Riddles,
with the Real Lessons Writ Small in its Margins.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back.
- Charles M. Schulz in his Peanuts cartoon

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

The only way to store information is by agreement.
The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind.
Our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive.
Humans punish themselves endlessly
for not being what they believe they should be.
We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others,
but we cannot accept and love ourselves.
- don Miguel Ruiz

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
- Omar Khayyam

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

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

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

Not everyone is always going to like what you do.
Your job application, your book proposal,
your offer of marriage is going to
get rejected sometimes - perhaps often.
Your boss, your spouse, even the person
behind you in the supermarket checkout line
is occasionally going to think that you are doing it all wrong.
Don't take it personally.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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

My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who,
a long long time ago went through life the way one reads a book.
- Anais Nin

The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment,
to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
- Charles Du Bos (1882-1939), from his book Approximations (1922)
(not Charles DuBois or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)

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

I've always had a love for poetry,
and when I got signed to a record label I thought,
"How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry."
- Jewel

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

The final lesson a writer learns is that
everything can nourish the writer.
The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter,
a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
- Anais Nin

I have never written a book that didn't teach me
far more than it taught any reader.
- Isaac Asimov

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

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

Faith:
When you walk to the edge of all the light you have
and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown,
you must believe that one of two things will happen:
...
There will be something solid for you to stand upon,
or, you will be taught how to fly
- Patrick Overton - from his book of poems: The Leaning Tree, 1975
[Widely mis-attributed to Barbara J. Winter, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and others]

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 most permanent lessons in morals are those which come,
not of booky teaching, but of experience.
- Mark Twain

Being defeated is often a temporary condition.
Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners.
That is our permanent state.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment
and the other by acts of love. Power based on love
is a thousand times more effective and permanent
then the one derived from fear of punishment.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

I object to violence because
when it appears to do good,
the good is only temporary;
the evil it does is permanent.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

The only thing that makes life possible
is permanent, intolerable uncertainty;
not knowing what comes next.
- Ursula K. Le Guin

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dry rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
- Jack London

If physical death is the price
that I must pay to free my brothers and sisters
from a permanent death of the spirit,
then nothing can be more redemptive.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images,
just watching images passing by which I cannot live in,
make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
- Anais Nin

The Four Stages of Public Opinion
I (Just after publication): The novelty is absurd
and subversive of Religion and Morality.
The propounder both fool and knave.
II (Twenty years later): The Novelty is absolute Truth
and will yield a full and satisfactory
explanation of things in general -
The propounder a man of sublime genius and perfect virtue.
III (Forty years later): The Novelty won't explain
things in general after all, and therefore is a wretched failure.
The propounder a very ordinary person advertised by a clique.
IV (A century later): The Novelty a mixture of truth and error.
Explains as much as could reasonably be expected.
The propounder worthy of all honor
in spite of his share of human frailties,
as one who has added to the permanent possessions of science.
- Thomas Henry [T. H.] Huxley

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph
is for enough good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Choose Inner Peace.
Nothing is worth losing your inner peace.
Take action as circumstances require,
but never surrender your inner peace.
Stop. Breathe deeply.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply again.
Then, and only then, take action -
from a peaceful heart.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill

Money has never made man happy, nor will it,
there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness.
The more of it one has the more one wants.
- Benjamin Franklin

We know nothing at all.
All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren.
The real nature of things we shall never know.
- Albert Einstein

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Wisdom Quotes