Common Book Quotes

#1. It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours.
from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Lewis Buzbee

#2. It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

James Russell Lowell

#3. And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

Paul Auster

#4. Sorry, he said penitently. It's a book. I have no common sense around them.

Patricia A. McKillip

#5. What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

Elie Wiesel

#6. I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law, learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.

Davy Crockett

#7. Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#8. As noted, naming a book after someone significant was a common way of honoring that person and reflecting his views.

Reza Aslan

#9. Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.

Patrick Carman

#10. 'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Elizabeth Strout

#11. Excellence is doing a common thing in an uncommon way.

Albert Einstein

#12. I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.

Nancy Pearl

#13. Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book.

Vladimir Nabokov

#14. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.

Arthur Koestler

#15. A book for everyone concerned about our common future.

Jim MacNeill

#16. Let's just say that I don't think our show has very much in common with the book any more.

Kristin Davis

#17. Hinduism does not rest on the authority of one book or one prophet, nor does it posses a common creed like the Kalma.

Mahatma Gandhi

#18. The first chess book that I read was Dufresne's self-tutor, published with Lasker's Common Sense in Chess as an appendix.

Vasily Smyslov

#19. My heart is firmly fixed, O God, my heart is fixed" (Ps. 57:7, The Book of Common Prayer, 664). The

Jane Tomaine

#20. It's a common storyline and mythology in the comic book community - which technically is the only community more frightened by the vagina than the religious community.

Ryan Patricks

#21. I would rather write a book without a title if my true friend chooses to live in a million dollar home in London and acts foreign.

Duop Chak Wuol

#22. The Buke of Ye Chess used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality. Neither book illustrates play or player improvement, but uses the chessboard and pieces to 'allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good'2.

Laura Caine Ramsey

#23. I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one - And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.

Charles Darwin

#24. Self-doubt is common, but when it impedes you from attaining your goals it's time to take action. This book shows you how to move beyond feeling like an imposter so that you can achieve your full personal and professional potential.

Lois P Frankel

#25. Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

Robert Frost

#26. Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

David Rakoff

#27. The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.

Thomas Hobbes

#28. After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says:
... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

Felix Alba-Juez

#29. So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.

Jonathan Franzen

#30. I went to school, I went to college. I know how to read. Even though I lack common sense sometimes, I am book smart.

Nicole Polizzi

#31. Eastman Jacob's legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton's Tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonian's feelings that the Good Lord didn't always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#32. Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching." - From an ancient Assyrian tablet.

Sidney Homer

#33. Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency

Edward Hirsch

#34. God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed.

Robert Charles Wilson

#35. I'm bookbrained-the act of book obsession common in writers. Not to be confused with bookbrains, a delicacy for zombies when eating the former.

Zara Steen

#36. Young men, of course, don't want to be guided by old back numbers, but at the same time I know that in my own case I gained a lot by studying the characters of the chiefs under whom I served from time to time. Lord Wolseley, for instance, said: "Use your common sense rather than book instructions."

Robert Baden-Powell

#37. God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.

Khalil Gibran

#38. Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

Oscar Wilde

#39. One of Cranmer's goals in writing and revising the Book of Common Prayer was to get Scripture into the ears of the people so that their hearts might be turned to God and their lives transformed by his love. Cranmer

Michael Jensen

#40. I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.

Benjamin Franklin

#41. All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?

Sean Hinn

#42. For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Hilary Mantel

#43. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies, What are you when the sun shall rise? This was printed with music as early as 1624, in East's Sixth Set of Books, and is found in many manuscripts.

Henry Wotton

#44. Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?

Walter Dean Myers

#45. Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.

E. Millicent Sowerby

#46. My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

Alton Brown

#47. It's good to make mistakes whether they are common or obscure, we learn more from our own mistakes while working rather than from any book or lecture.

Tanay Pant

#48. Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.

Studs Terkel

#49. USE COMMON SENSE. If somebody offers you a thousand dollars for this book, chances are their motives are not pure. Then again, a thousand dollars is a lot of money. Take the money and run.

Pseudonymous Bosch

#50. Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.

Jan Karon

#51. If you're wondering, is this book for me? Well, if you're the kind of reader who orders another round just to see if you can seal the deal with the depressed bass player because "Hey! I'm sad too! We have so much in common!" then the answer is yes.

Ophira Eisenberg

#52. Pedantry, in the common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books and a total ignorance of men.

Henry MacKenzie

#53. Clothes dissolving, skin pressing together like the pages of a book, bound by a common spine.

Chris Cole

#54. As for the common men apart, Who sweat to keep their common breath, And have no hour for books or art
What dreams have these to hide from death!

Lola Ridge

#55. The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

Gayle Lynds

#56. If you don't have common sense, ask someone who does

Sonya Withrow

#57. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#58. She was pretty sure that if she had been, though, none of the hypotheticals would have resembled this in the slightest: surrounded by vampires, possibly pregnant, with a fallen angel in an Elvis costume mangling the ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer.

J.R. Ward

#59. But a central message there is, and it is the recognition of this that has led to the common treatment of the Bible as a book, and not simply a collection of books - just as the Greek plural biblia (books) became the Latin singular biblia (the book).

Philip W. Comfort

#60. Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.

LeVar Burton

#61. No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

Thomas Carlyle

#62. No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

William Carlos Williams

#63. Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners

Isaac D'Israeli

#64. There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#65. For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full ...

Jonathan Swift

#66. Before my book, the most common assessment of Eleanor Marx is "Yes, she's great but basically she's in the shadow of her father." Absolute bollocks. She fought him, she resisted, and she was not a kind of trocadateur of his ideas.

Rachel Holmes

#67. Voltaire spoke of the Bible as a short-lived book. He said that within a hundred years it would pass from common use. Not many people read Voltaire today, but his house has been packed with Bibles as a depot of a Bible society.

Bruce Barton

#68. And hast thou sworn on every slight pretence,
Till perjuries are common as bad pence,
While thousands, careless of the damning sin,
Kiss the book's outside, who ne'er look'd within?

William Cowper

#69. Heroes in books should be so much better than heroes got up for the world's common wear and tear

Anthony Trollope

#70. ADVERSARIA (ADVERSA'RIA) n.s.[Lat. A book, as it should seem, in which Debtor and Creditor were set in opposition.]A common-place; a book to note in. These parchments are supposed to have been St. Paul's adversaria.Bull'sSermons.

Samuel Johnson

#71. I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#72. I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.

Joan Didion

#73. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

Alberto Manguel

#74. Having a family that loves books and loves to read has always created a common ground for communication.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#75. There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize
it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.

Stanislaw Lem