Best Books Quotes

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. ~ Julian Barnes

Of all things, I liked books best. ~ Nikola Tesla

The best books act like a powerful drug--they take you out of your own head into experiences, emotions and settings a million miles away. ~ Anonymous-9

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither. ~ Jean Hanff Korelitz

Sometimes the best books are the ones no-one has heard of and you have to dig deep to find. ~ Crystal Spears

Come, my best friends, my best books, and lead me on. ~ Abraham Cowley

A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books - the best books - give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely. ~ Blake Morrison

Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads. ~ Lord Chesterfield

The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

If your goal is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and most of your focus has been on finding the church that will best meet your needs, figuring out which translation of the Bible is the best, or reading the best books on discipleship that you can find, but your life is the same as it was before - I would argue that you aren't becoming a disciple. Nothing other than following Jesus Christ can make you his disciple. ~ Kevin Watson

I suppose I tend to like slightly darker things - people have levelled that on me before and I accept that because in my opinion, if I mention the best movies or the best books, there's always something that's involving slightly darker element of out psyche. I like seeing people under pressure. I like seeing what happens to people when they're under pressure. ~ Cillian Murphy

I've always loved literature, and the best books I read were always trilogies. ~ Dawn Angelique

At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction of Christianity and subsequent historical events. ~ Isabella Bird

The best books arise from some ultimate question in the author. ~ Isobelle Carmody

You Can't Change Your Life... Until You Change Your Heart, and You Can't Change Your Heart... Until You Change Your Mind! ~ Latif Mercado

What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century. Yes, we should be grateful for the best books, for the best spiritual achievements in our lives. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON ~ Leo Tolstoy

There is nothing like discovering your own secrets in someone else's story. Those thoughts and feelings you believed were too ugly or strange or idealistic or desperate or whimsical or hungry or sad they had to be just you because there could be no other place for them, anywhere. Books that make you realize you're not alone, you never were. Those are the ones I like best. ~ Courtney Summers

Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. ~ Doctrine And Covenants 88 118

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books. ~ Aldous Huxley

I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up. ~ Bruce Chatwin

The best books come from someplace deep inside ... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either. ~ Judy Blume

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet. ~ Edward Abbey

Don Vicente, a monk of the Convent of Pobla in Aragon, murdered several collectors in order to get their best books; ~ Harold Rabinowitz

One of the best books I've read was George S. Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon, which offers financial advice in a collection of parables. ~ Sophia Amoruso

An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion.
GQ 71 (GQ is A Guide for Quorums of the Melchizedek Priesthood, 3rd Edition, 1930) ~ John Andreas Widtsoe

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference. ~ Simon Schama

The best books - like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games - can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us. ~ Geoffrey Reiter

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best. ~ J.R. Moehringer

The best books are the ones that ask the most questions. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Originals by Adam Grant is one of the best books I've read on how to be more creative at work and how to think outside the box, sell your ideas, and make a difference. 10.YOUR CREATIVE LIFE. The War of Art by Steven ~ Vishen Lakhiani

Read the best books first, otherwise you'll find you do not have time.
- Henry David Thoreau ~ Leo Tolstoy

The best books ...
The best books of men are soon exhausted
they are cisterns, and not springing fountains.
You enjoy them very much at the first acquaintance,
and you think you could hear them a hundred times over-
but you could not- you soon find them wearisome.
Very speedily a man eats too much honey:
even children at length are cloyed with sweets.
All human books grow stale after a time-
but with the Word of God the desire to study it increases,
while the more you know of it the less you think you know.
The Book grows upon you: as you dive into its depths
you have a fuller perception of the infinity which remains
to be explored. You are still sighing to enjoy more of that
which it is your bliss to taste. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. ~ Robert Morgan

No shame in having a ghostwriter," Storm said. "Some of the best books published every year are penned by talented writers whose identity the public will never know. ~ Richard Castle

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss. ~ Tad Williams

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. ~ Saul Bellow

Perhaps death is just a big lie. ~ Bella James

The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere. ~ Orison Swett Marden

You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there's ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind - when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it's ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we're uniquely important to them - before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they're anyone's. ~ Blake Morrison

The very best books don't just entertain, uplift or educate us. They enfold us in their world and make us step outside of ourselves and become transformed. And sometimes, if we are really lucky, they ennoble and affirm us. ~ Brian Shenton

Sometimes the best books are hidden gems that you didn't even know were out there! ~ Carmela Dutra

Some of the greatest stories ever told are about the everyday mundane experiences that we can all relate to. Reading isn't always about escaping to faraway lands, the best books are the ones that resonate on an emotional level. The author and reader are connected by a tin-can string of words across thousands of miles and hundreds of centuries. ~ Adriane Leigh

I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them ~ Barbara Kingsolver

We have been counseled to "seek ... out of the best books words of wisdom." It is pointed out in Proverbs, "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom." (Proverbs 4:7.) But in getting wisdom and getting knowledge, above all we should "get understanding." It is important to learn a profession, learn a trade. That applies not only to the young men, but it applies to you young women as well. You girls should place yourselves in a position to be self-supporting and independent in the event that tragedy or an emergency comes, for emergencies have come and will continue to come. ~ Henry D. Taylor

No one can steal your freedom from you. You can only give it away. ~ Bella James

It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. ~ William Ellery Channing

I am made of a thousand ghosts. Only you can shoot me down. ~ Bella James

Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance. ~ Julia Glass

The best books were those uninhabited by those who wrote them. ~ Joy Williams

I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics; ~ Donald Miller

And I don't care what age you are, kissing in the rain is the best. ~ Carew Papritz

The best books ... are those that tell you what you know already. ~ George Orwell

Losing yourself in a book is the best ~ Chris Columbus

Only the best books are special. Why? Because they open our eyes, touch us, excite us, extend us. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Broken Porzelan is one of the best books I have read in a long time. I highly recommend it to anyone. ~ Katie (Katharina Kr Mer) Bering

The only problem is that it's difficult to imagine something entirely new. We use the words and definitions of the past to shape our ideas. Something that is genuinely the next evolutionary step is unlikely to resemble anything we can imagine. Even the best books on the subject are limited." She'd ~ Genevieve Cogman

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading. ~ Rikki Ducornet

Many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge roses breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn, while the blackbird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

I invite you, wholeheartedly, to read books that remind you of your highest self and emancipate you from mental slavery or false beliefs and illusions. The more you invest in attracting books that resonate with the frequency of your true self, the more light you will bring to the world. ~ Carlos Santana

One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?", that's not the question you're asking. The question you're like is do you like ME right now. ~ John Green

I don't think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don't forget that there are also books. I don't believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they're certainly not synonymous. ~ Alberto Manguel

I am Envy ... I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned. ~ Christopher Marlowe

Brendan stopped reading. The words had melted into a liquid blur ... In his possession was a box full of information that would likely fill in the gaps and help him to wrap his brain around the whys of her death. And yet, there was really only one question that mattered, and Tommy had already answered it. ~ Lynda Meyers

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload h ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens. ~ John Darnielle

A classic yields significantly different meanings when read in different circumstances and moods; on a larger scale, a classic conveys wholly different worlds when read in different times of life, at different stages of experience, feeling, and understanding of life. Classics may be interesting and even entertaining, but people always find they are not like books used for diversion, which give up all of their content at once; the classics seem to grow wiser as we grow wiser, more useful the more we use them. ~ Sun Tzu

I'm no prophet, but I'm guessing that comic books will always be strong. I don't think anything can really beat the pure fun and pleasure of holding a magazine in your hand, reading the story on paper, being able to roll it up and put it in your pocket, reread again later, show it to a friend, carry it with you, toss it on a shelf, collect them, have a lot of magazines lined up and read them again as a series. I think young people have always loved that. I think they always will. ~ Stan Lee

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things. ~ Azar Nafisi

History books report one war after another. 'History' is the dates of wars, who won and who lost. But in truth, no one ever wins a war. Someone obtained the spoils, but no one wins.

'Intermediate Guide To Meditation ~ Kriyananda

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver. ~ Amos Oz

I remember hearing a saying long ago: 'Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,' " I said. ~ Yoko Ogawa

Once he'd asked, "Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room."
She had laughed and said, "I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

Our world today is in the same condition, in total denial that God is real and angry with sinners. ~ Jonah Books.com

I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment. ~ Joe Queenan

So, you'd rather just regurgitate what these books tell you than know what really happened?"

"Exactly."

"No quest for truth? Where's your spirit of exploration?"

"You never went to college, did you? ~ Gene Doucette

When you start searching for 'pure elements' in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn't do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is 'healthy'. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante's time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare's time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn't really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn't be considered as 'great men' or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able 'to see the wood for the trees'. He may know what he 'likes'. He may be a 'compleat book-lover', with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, ~ Ezra Pound

Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or politicians, nor should anyone else. ~ Joe Queenan

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions. ~ James Salter

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew
in the incontestable way that children know things
that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other. ~ Martha Cooley

I grew up on welfare in the South Bronx; I had a very tough upbringing in that neighborhood. Reading books like The Four Agreements, A Return to Love, and The Power of Now helped me to overcome many internal battles. Had I not worked on myself, put value in myself, I would not have the loving and supportive people that I have right now in my life, including my husband and children ~ Andrea Navedo

One whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises. ~ Chanakya

Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, former paid companion to several of the ton's most successful debutantes of prior seasons, came to Havenhurst to fill the position of Elizabeth's duenna. A woman of fifty with wiry gray hair she scraped back into a bun and the posture of a ramrod, she had a permanently pinched face, as if she smelled something disagreeable but was too well-bred to remark upon it. In addition to the duenna's daunting physical appearance, Elizabeth observed shortly after their first meeting that Miss Throckmorton-Jones possessed an astonishing ability to sit serenely for hours without twitching so much as a finger.
Elizabeth refused to be put off by her stony demeanor and set about finding a way to thaw her. Teasingly, she called her "Lucy," and when the casually affectionate nickname won a thunderous frown from the lady, Elizabeth tried to find a different means. She discovered it very soon: A few days after Lucinda came to live at Havenhurst the duenna discovered her curled up in a chair in Havenhurt's huge library, engrossed in a book. "You enjoy reading?" Lucinda had said gruffly-and with surprise-as she noted the gold embossed title on the volume.
"Yes," Elizabeth had assured her, smiling. "Do you?"
"Have you read Christopher Marlowe?"
"Yes, but I prefer Shakespeare."
Thereafter it became their policy each night after supper to debate the merits of the individual books they'd read. Before long Elizabeth realized that she'd won the d ~ Judith McNaught

There's more mystical nonsense written about the process of writing than almost anything. Inspiration, genius, "the muse." So I want to lay out one huge, comforting, wonderful fact: the more you write, the better you get at it. Writing is like a forehand or driving a car or playing guitar. Practice makes you better.

That's not to say inspiration and genius don't exist. Not everyone can become Tolstoy through hard work. What it means is that, wherever you start, you can improve. And the way to do it is to write a lot.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that I've published eight books. When I flip through the first one now, I can't believe it ever made it onto shelves. I see so many flaws and problems in it that I'm amazed. The reason is that I've written hundreds of thousands of words between since then. As long as you produce a little something every day, every week, in time, invisibly, you'll get better. Trailing behind every successful writer are a million words that never saw the light of day. Sometimes it takes five million words. The most important piece of writing advice anyone can give or get is simple, and therefore can seem uninteresting, but it's true: just keep writing. ~ Charles Finch

When we were children, letters were like fun toys. We played with them through our building blocks. We colored them in books. We danced and sang along with TV puppets while learning C was for "cookie." Soon, letters turned into words. Words turned into sentences. Sentences turned into thoughts. And along the way, we stopped playing with them and stopped marveling at A through Z. ~ Ji Lee

Books are cold but sure friends. ~ Victor Hugo

The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was miserable most of the time. ~ Jack Black

...books give a man ideas, they make him want to live. ~ Patricia Engel

I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most. ~ James Howe