The Quotes canon
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1 quote
The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1972Bertolt 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 · 1980Clifton 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 · 1957Edward Bulwer-Lytton1 quote
The pen is mightier than the sword. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton · 1839Ernest Hemingway1 quote
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. — Ernest Hemingway · 1934F. Scott Fitzgerald1 quote
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. — F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1938Franz Kafka1 quote
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904George Orwell1 quote
Good prose is like a windowpane. — George Orwell · 1946Gerald Brenan1 quote
You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that. — Gerald Brenan · 1986Italo Calvino1 quote
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. — Italo Calvino · 1981James Baldwin1 quote
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. — James Baldwin · 1963Jhumpa Lahiri1 quote
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri · 2012John 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 Conrad1 quote
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. — Joseph Conrad · 1897Marcel 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 · 1922Maya Angelou1 quote
I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth." — Maya Angelou · 2013Nathaniel Hawthorne1 quote
Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1848Rene Descartes1 quote
The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts. — Rene Descartes · 1637Stewart Brand1 quote
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window. — Stewart Brand · 1994William Ellery Channing1 quote
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. — William Ellery Channing · 1838William Hazlitt1 quote
Hamlet is a name: His speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. — William Hazlitt · 1817