Great Book Quotes - Page 2

• In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Exercise, Voice

  9 Copy quote

• The Imitation of Christ is a cherished treasure of the Christian world. This great book was written by a Roman Catholic monk. "Written", perhaps, is not the proper word. It would be more appropriate to say that each letter of the book is marked deep with the heart's blood of the great soul who had renounced all for his love of Christ.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Christian, Jesus, Book

  Swami Vivekananda (1955). “Complete Works”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world is a great book, of which they that never stir from home read only a page.

  Saint Augustine

  Life, Book, Home

  14 Copy quote

• I read when I get up in the morning, when I can during the day and every single evening. Most of my weekends are spent reading great books. Books are my constant companions. If you eat three times a day you'll be fed. But if you read three times a day you'll be wise.

  Shimon Peres

  Wise, Morning, Book

  224 Copy quote

• Great books don't make great movies. There's too much information in there.

  Casey Affleck

  Book, Too Much Information, Information

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. June 17, 2010.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Intellectual, Mind

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is actually a great book called Prima Donna by Rupert -Christiansen that deconstructs the myth. In fact, many of the women who were prima donnas were feminists and incredible forces for their time.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Book, Feminist, Facts

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The peace of great books be for you,
  Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
  Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

  Carl Sandburg

  Book, Light, Years

  Carl Sandburg (2015). “Harvest Poems: 1910-1960”, p.88, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

  Russell Kirk

  Art, Book, Taken

  15 Copy quote

• Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Animal, Imagination, Temptation

  4 Copy quote

• A great book should leave you with many experiences.

  William Styron

  Book, Should, Inspirational Reading

  William Styron, James L. W. West (1985). “Conversations with William Styron”, p.12, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• A great book is like great evil.

  Callimachus

  Book, Evil

  Fragment 465

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Book, Men, Presidential

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46”, p.628, Library of America

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• God gave me this great book to preach from, and if He has put anything in it you think is not fit, go and complain to Him, not to me. I am simply his servant, and if His errand that I am to tell is objectionable, I cannot help it.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Book, Thinking, Complaining

  14 Copy quote

• I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.

  Elon Musk

  Smart, Book, Mean

  32 Copy quote

• I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out.

  Viola Davis

  Book, Black, Personal History

  Source: aalbc.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Night, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it

  Molly Antopol

  Book, People, Holocaust

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone who is constantly right, who is only felled by Kryptonite. Chuck Klosterman had a pretty great book about this whole thing - I Wear The Black Hat - that came out last year and which I greatly enjoyed.

  Tod Goldberg

  Book, Years, Kryptonite

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Topics, Strive

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance...Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible.

  Pierre L. van den Berghe

  Book, Achievement, Elegance

  4 Copy quote

• Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Two, Interesting

  6 Copy quote

• And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.

  Jeff Bezos

  Book, Borders, Care

  4 Copy quote

• I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Age, Titles

  Source: www.slate.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source