The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Ray Bradbury3 quotes
I discovered me in the library. — Ray Bradbury · 2010You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. — Ray Bradbury · 1993There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. — Ray Bradbury · 2010Francis Bacon2 quotes
Age, that Age appeared
to be best in four things: Old
Wood best to burn, Old Wine to drink, Old
Friends to trust, and old Authors to read. — Francis Bacon · 1625Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. — Francis Bacon · 1625Franz Kafka2 quotes
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904Jane Austen2 quotes
There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — Jane Austen · 1813If a book is well written, I always find it too short. — Jane Austen · 1817John Ruskin2 quotes
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. — John Ruskin · 1864Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books. — John Ruskin · 1864A.S.W. Rosenbach1 quote
After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sport of all. — A.S.W. Rosenbach · 1936Allan Bloom1 quote
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency-the belief that the here and now is all there is. — Allan Bloom · 1987Barbara Tuchman1 quote
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman · 1980Benjamin Franklin1 quote
From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. — Benjamin Franklin · 1790Bertolt Brecht1 quote
Reach for the book: It is a weapon. — Bertolt Brecht · 1935Carl Sagan1 quote
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. — Carl Sagan · 1980Cicero1 quote
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. — Cicero · 44 BCClifton Fadiman1 quote
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. — Clifton Fadiman · 1957Colson Whitehead1 quote
An accident of timing makes the book in question indelible. — Colson Whitehead · 2005E.M. Forster1 quote
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. — E.M. Forster · 1944Elizabeth Gaskell1 quote
I look at them as a child looks at a cake,-with glittering eyes and watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him! — Elizabeth Gaskell · 1859Haruki Murakami1 quote
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. — Haruki Murakami · 1987Henry Peacham1 quote
To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a childe that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping. — Henry Peacham · 1622Henry Ward Beecher1 quote
Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! — Henry Ward Beecher · 1854Italo Calvino1 quote
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. — Italo Calvino · 1981Jerry Seinfeld1 quote
What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses-like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it? — Jerry Seinfeld · 1991John Milton1 quote
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. — John Milton · 1644Jonathan Safran Foer1 quote
Sometimes I think of the books I'll never read that would have changed my life. — Jonathan Safran Foer · 2005Joseph Addison1 quote
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. — Joseph Addison · 1711Lady Mary Wortley Montagu1 quote
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu · 1753Logan Pearsall Smith1 quote
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. — Logan Pearsall Smith · 1931Malcolm X1 quote
My alma mater was books. — Malcolm X · 1965Marcel Proust1 quote
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth. — Marcel Proust · 1922Oscar Wilde1 quote
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Patti Smith1 quote
There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book. — Patti Smith · 2010