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Books Quotes

Samuel Johnson is on this page more than once for good reason. In The Rambler (1750) he wrote that no place gives a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. Boswell (1791) has him saying that a man ought to read just as inclination leads him, because what he reads as a task will do him little good. Alberto Manguel, Emerson and Northrop Frye are among the most-quoted writers here, which is what you would expect from people who spent their working lives reading.

Two entries are flagged as misattributed. The quip about a manuscript that is both good and original, with the good parts not original and the original parts not good, is credited to Johnson. “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” is credited to General Patton.

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Most quoted on books:

We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.

Jefferson Davis

Sometimes "fidelity" can mean only focusing on one day of a story told over twenty years in a book.

Patricia Rozema

I have written this book to discharge a debt.

Walter Rauschenbusch Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read.

J. Howard Moore

But it’s frustrating, that you know what good literature is but you cannot get it totally right.

Geling Yan

Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read books, even if he had to do so in secret.

Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)

A novelist has two lives — a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Jane Smiley Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than to the intellect. Hard reading exercises the mind.

John P. Marquand The Late George Apley (1937)

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Sigmund Freud Letter to Ernest Jones (1933)

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

William Penn Advice to his children (1699)

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

Denis Diderot

We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.

Barack Obama

A sweet attractive kinde of grace,
A full assurance given by lookes,
Continuall comfort in a face
The lineaments of Gospell bookes.

Mathew Roydon

I've had enough of the Quran in The Netherlands: ban that fascist book.

Geert Wilders Marked for Death (2012)

Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on.

William Shakespeare King John (1598)

I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

Winston Churchill My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

Henry Miller The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Roberto Bolaño Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorising everyone into conformity.

George Orwell

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