Inspiring Book Quotes

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it ~ James Bryce

If God did not wish us to understand the book of Revelation, He would not have given it to us at all. ~ D.L. Moody

The more he gave away, the more delighted he became. ~ Marcus Pfister

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. ~ Salman Rushdie

If you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book. ~ J.K. Rowling

It isn't what the book costs. It's what it will cost you if you don't read it. ~ Jim Rohn

The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. ~ Chinua Achebe

Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose - except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect.
By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America's past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free." Jeffers ~ Jared Taylor

Some people have used this song as evidence that I worship the devil, which is another chapter for the big book of stupid. It's really just laughable. But the sad part is that it's not even remotely a song about devil worship! It's a song about the intersection of some basic human emotions, the place where sadness meets rage, where our need to mourn meets our lust for justice, where our faith meets our inclination to take matters into our own hands, like karmic vigilantes. People who hear the word Lucifer and start making accusations are just robbing themselves of an opportunity to get in touch with something deeper than that, something inside their own souls. ~ Jay-Z

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979) ~ Jack McClelland

God is a book I can no longer read. ~ Floriano Martins

Dedicated to book lovers and book bloggers everywhere, those large and small. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards. This is your life and mine. I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down. ~ Mr. Lee

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to. ~ Betsy Lerner

The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets challenging after a while. It tests your stamina. ~ Walter Kirn

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red. ~ Clive Barker

Graciously live life. There is return from the grave. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams. ~ William Butler Yeats

Onomatomania (n.) Vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. Finding a word that so perfectly describes a rather large portion of my everyday existence is one of the things that makes reading the dictionary feel like an intensely personal endeavor. The book is no longer merely a list of words; suddenly it is a catalog of the foibles of the human condition, and it is speaking directly to me. Of course, as soon as I learned this word I promptly forgot what it was, but this just provided me with the frustration of not being able to think of it, and then the satisfaction of once again finding it. also ~ Ammon Shea

She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side. ~ Victoria Kahler

You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book. ~ Thulani Davis

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance. ~ Lawrence Thornton

What better way to learn about life in the ocean
and how we are changing it
than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth. ~ Enric Sala

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order. ~ Chris Cleave

Writing a book is an adventure. ~ Winston Churchill

What is a gentleman, anyway?
He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry:

Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

Yes, "smallpox was. ~ Steven Pinker

The greatest
service one can do
is working for the
flowering of one's
consciousness.
- HDH Bhagavan Sri Nitnyananda Paramashivoham, in the book, "Living Enlightenement ~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda

Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension. ~ Sergio Chejfec

She had to survive if for no other reason than to spite the world.

Kova, Elise. Fire Falling (Air Awakens Series Book 2) ~ Elise Kova

The person who has read just a single book argues.
The person who has read the entire library watches in silence. ~ Unknown

I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting. ~ David Sedaris

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.
"To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page. ~ Justin Cronin

My post-child period resulted in one instant change: I write shorter books for kids. ~ Berkeley Breathed

Don't forget your own self while preaching to others. ~ Umar

We made love... and sushi. ~ C.J. English

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was ... that was what I did. I was the kid with the book. ~ Neil Gaiman

We make two assumptions that are vital to the arguments in this book: There are active managers that can beat the market (i.e., the market is not completely efficient). Superior active managers can be identified. ~ Meb Faber

I think this is the first time I've altered a book based on what you guys told me. So it's an occasion! Soon I'll be putting up polls to choose between plots, and then it's a short stop to accepting anonymous contributions and stapling them together while I sip margaritas on the deck of a Pacific cruise ship. ~ Max Barry

There are many themes found in the Book of Psalms that are generally not found in modern music. These include the fear of God, the righteousness and justice of God, the sovereignty of God, the judgement of God, the evil of sin, spiritual and physical warfare, the arch enemies of the Christian, the destruction of the wicked, the reality of hell, the blessedness of the church, the vicious attacks upon the church, the commandments of God, the dominion of David's son, and so on. Without the backdrop of these truths, the themes of love, mercy, faith, and salvation become largely meaningless. ~ Kevin Swanson

A good book makes you feel better about the world ~ Me

I source images and ideas from different parts of my experiences, and sometimes they are things that are made-up, or just appear out of nowhere, like out of a dream or an image that I've seen in a book, or even the title of a book that I'm staring at on a shelf. It's a good way to write songs, just stare at a bookshelf! ~ Julia Stone

In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

There's almost always a church youth group at the soup kitchen. I have yet to see an atheists' youth group. Yeah, I know, religious people don't have a monopoly on doing good. I'm sure that there are many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular gropus like Doctors without Borders. But I've got to say: It's a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good. ~ A. J. Jacobs

Books can lift our spirits, heal our wounds, steel our courage and strengthen our religious resolve. ~ Scott Cunningham

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. ~ Anna Quindlen