c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.
— Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization Versus Re-enchantment
... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).
— Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization Versus Re-enchantment
It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.
— Bill  Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation
Somehow creationists keep us naturalists in track to some extent. They are the representation of human stupidity at its extreme. And we need some stupidity in the society for true intellect to be adored.
— Abhijit Naskar
What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Even humanity's lack of concern for its rampant overpopulation problem now made a terrible kind of sense. What difference did it make if our planet was capable of supporting all seven billion of us in the long term when a far greater threat to our numbers was waiting in the wings? And despite the overwhelming odds, humanity had done what was necessary to ensure its own survival. It filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species. We weren't a bunch of primitive monkeys teetering on the brink of self-destruction after all—this appeared ti be an altogether different kind of destruction we were teetering on the brink of.
— Ernest Cline, Armada
The happiest moment i've ever felt was that moment when i discovered my ability to create.
— Dr. Hazem Ali
... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value.
— Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization Versus Re-enchantment
My continuing passion is to explore strange industries, to acquire new knowledge and ask many questions, to boldly learn something I did not know before.
— Boripat Lebel
I really need to restructure my life so I can spend more time reading abstracts and less time punching dinosaurs."- Atomic Robo
— Brian Clevinger, Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time
Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn’t just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain’s provenance is inseparable from other species’ brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind.
— Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
If you do not completely accept yourself, you can not love yourself fully. It would be hard to love anything unconditionally.
— Avis J. Williams
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
All that happens in the human brain is but the result of electro-chemical reactions. Be it of love, hate, of pleasure, of suffering, of imagination, or all other states of mind, sentiment or sickness; the process depends in every case on the chemical reactions produced in the interior of the brain, and the resulting electrical impulses or messages, be they visual, auditory, based on memory, or an interpretation of new events based on elements that one has in the memory.
— Raël, Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers
Everything starts from inside of us, then comes outside of us.
— Avis J. Williams
Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Don't believe everything you are told, if it resonates within you, then listen and act.
— Avis J. Williams
There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom
In fact, science is neither materialist nor idealist; it is simply science. It’s impartial and can’t be answerable for the direction of its conclusions.
— Valerian Pidmohylny, Невеличка драма
Movement is life!
— Alessandro Boccaletti, Veritas The Pharmacological Endgame
But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; an if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
For many years I have been saying that I would like to write a book (or series of books) called Physics for Mathematicians. Whenever I would tell people that, they would say, “Oh good, you're going to explain quantum mechanics, or string theory, or something like that”. And I would say, “Well that would be nice, but I can't begin to do that now; first I have to learn elementary physics, so the first thing I will be writing will be Mechanics for Mathematicians”. So then people would say, “Ah, so you're going to be writing about symplectic structures”, or something of that sort. And I would have to say, “No, I'm not trying to write a book about mathematics for mathematicians, I'm trying to write a book about physics for mathematicians”; …… it's elementary mechanics that I don't understand. … I mean, for example, that I don't understand this – lever.... Most of us know the law of the lever, but this law is simply a quantitative statement of exactly how amazing the lever is, and doesn't give us a clue as to why it is true, how such a small force at one end can exert such a great force at the other. Now physicists all agree that Newton's Three Laws are the basis from which all of mechanics follows, but if you ask for an explanation of the lever in terms of these three laws, you will almost certainly not get a satisfactory answer.
— Michael Spivak
Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe
—  that was almost an article of faith among scientists.
And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.
— Alan Moore, Jerusalem
The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as though she should. The architect would appear tobe more skilled (as the word is usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized,” are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.
— Levitt/Dubner, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
When we say to someone, "Oh you're behaving like an animal," it's actually a compliment rather than an insult. We need to work for a science of peace and build a culture of empathy, and emphasize the positive, pro-social side of the character of other animals and ourselves. It's truly who we and other animals are.
— Marc Bekoff, Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
— Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom
Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom
School taught me how to do language, maths and science; it failed to teach me the very basics of how to keep my home healthy.
— Steven Magee
Nothing comes from nothing
— Islam. A. Aly, A spark of everything
Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?" he asked. "Why would you want that much acid? You don't need that much acid.""Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving," said Jack. "Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn't 'let' me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.""What were you expecting it to rain?" said Christopher. "Bears?
— Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway
[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.
— Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence
By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....
— Orson Scott Card, Alvin Journeyman
Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty'And particling, I shouldn't wonder' said the Alderman
— Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
There is more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.
— H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror
Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
A simple statement of untruth in words is called a lie. If a lie is perpetrated not merely by words but by methodic action it is called a fraud. It the action consists in creating a false object and putting it forward as a true object, we call it a forgery….A lie, a fraud, a forgery always imply conscious and deliberate action with the purpose to deceive.
— J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
... who can forget the amazement of a child balancing an adult on a see-saw, simply by being placed at the right position. How could this be? Where did all that extra force come from!?The only wonder nowadays is that a physics student is unlikely to produce a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps we will be offered a few mumblings about moments, force times distance, laws of the lever perhaps even the "principle of virtual work". But we probably won't get an answer that seems to explain where that extra force comes from; and it is highly unlikely that we will get an answer that begins by establishing principles about rigid bodies, even though the rigidity of the lever is an absolute necessity for it to work.In fact, the whole path from Newton's Laws, which basically concern "point masses", to bodies whose shape and extent are significant, is often rather dubiously traversed, even though elementary physics courses blithely pose such problems of the most diverse sorts.
— Michael Spivak, Physics for Mathematicians: Mechanics I
Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.
— Muditha Champika, Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is just a one instant and younger than a baby.
— Muditha Champika, Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
To be honest, i know noting about religion, since the world was created thousand of years ago, am just 30 years of age, and have stopped asking questions about how things came to being, but the truth about what i know is that the truth does not exit because i know noting
— lanre efizie
Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man.” This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world’s leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent.
— Algis Valiunas
Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, science is just a one instant like a baby trying to talk.
— Muditha Champika, Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
Perhaps as they say in science love is a reaction, and in art, it is a heart, but for me, love is simply you.
— Eyden I., Woman's Book: Only For Men
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
— Oscar Wilde
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
— Ernest Hemingway
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
— Oscar Wilde
One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.
— Mark Twain
Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
— Charles William Eliot
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
— William Styron, Conversations with William Styron
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
— C.S. Lewis
Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
— Francis Bacon
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
— Stephen King
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.
— Erasmus
You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
— George Bernard Shaw
I cannot live without books.
— Thomas Jefferson
Books may well be the only true magic.
— Alice Hoffman
Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.
— Stephen King
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
— Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
— Joseph Brodsky
That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
— Christopher Paolini, Eragon
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
— Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies
I spent my life folded between the pages of books.In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
— James     Baldwin
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
— J.K. Rowling
Reader's Bill of Rights1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes
— Daniel Pennac
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.
— Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
— Mortimer J. Adler
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
— C.S. Lewis
We live for books.
— Umberto Eco
What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.
— Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!
— John Waters
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
— Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.
— J.K. Rowling
but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
— Jane Austen
A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
— Madeleine L'Engle
There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.
— Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
— Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?
— Christopher Paolini
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
— Christopher Morley, Pipefuls
The world was hers for the reading.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
— Franz Kafka
One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
— Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
— Alan Bennett, The History Boys
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
— Franz Kafka
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
— Annie Dillard, The Living
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
— C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
— Isabel Allende
My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.
— Abraham Lincoln
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
A good book is an event in my life.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
— François Mauriac
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
— George Orwell, 1984
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
— C.S. Lewis
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
— Henry Miller, The Books in My Life
A house without books is like a room without windows.
— Horace Mann
A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.
— Astrid Lindgren
Have you really read all those books in your room?”Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
My library is an archive of longings.
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
— Guy de Maupassant
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
— Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters Of Thomas Babington Macaulay
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.	The book needs you.
— Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
— Abraham Lincoln
If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.
— Terry Pratchett
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
— Stephen Fry
He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
— Nicholson Baker
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
— Joseph Joubert
Be awesome! Be a book nut!
— Dr. Seuss
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
— Jeanette Winterson
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
— G.K. Chesterton
The VoiceThere is a voice inside of youThat whispers all day long,"I feel this is right for me,I know that this is wrong."No teacher, preacher, parent, friendOr wise man can decideWhat's right for you--just listen toThe voice that speaks inside.
— Shel Silverstein
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
— Stéphane Mallarmé
If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
— Stephen King
My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
— Malcolm X
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.
— Walt Disney Company
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.
— Gary Paulsen, Shelf Life: Stories by the Book
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
— Russell Banks, Continental Drift
The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!
— Wilkie Collins, Armadale
Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
— Arnold Lobel
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
— Carl Sagan
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
— Angela Carter
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
— John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous
I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.
— L.M. Montgomery
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.
— Neil Gaiman
Books were safer than other people anyway.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
For 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; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
— John Milton, Areopagitica
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.
— J.K. Rowling
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
— Neil Gaiman
He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?
— David Baldacci, The Camel Club
So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.
— Roald Dahl
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
— Ezra Pound
We live and breathe words.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
— George Gissing
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
— China Miéville, The City & the City
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
— Anna Quindlen
Only bad books have good endings.If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end.
— Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret
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. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working m
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Literature is news that stays news.
— Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
— George Carlin
The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.
— Cornelia Funke, The Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath
Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
— John Keats
That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
— Charles Baudelaire
When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
— Jean Fritz
I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go….
— Sharon Creech
I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
— Ray Bradbury
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
— Virginia Woolf
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
— Ezra Pound
I guess there are never enough books.
— John Steinbeck, A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
Stephenie Meyer: Her vampires are sparkly, which I think we can all agree is wrong.
— Christopher Moore
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.
— Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head
What are you doing with all those books anyway?" Ron asked. Just trying to decide which ones to take with us," said Hermione. When we're looking for the Horcruxes."Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting that yours will ever be.
— Elizabeth Scott, Bloom
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.
— Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly