Top 100 Great Books Quotes
#1. It holds my essential stuff, including a book - for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[ ... ]
Michael Chabon
#2. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.
Kristen Lamb
#3. Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.
Kathryn Stockett
#4. There are great books in this world and great worlds in books.
Anne Bronte
#5. The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.
Joseph Joubert
#6. Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#7. Wisdom is not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind, everything else is hearsay.
Joan Erikson
#8. In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.
James Purdy
#10. Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
Martin Amis
#11. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#12. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#13. Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.
Thomas Ehrlich
#14. Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#15. Good books teach you about others;
great books teach you about yourself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#16. Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
Chad Harbach
#17. Success is not measured by bestseller lists. Certain types of great books sell very well; other types of great books don't sell a lot. But they're both great.
Po Bronson
#18. Great books live longer than people.
They are gonna bury us all.
Patricia Nedelea
#20. Great books don't make great movies. There's too much information in there.
Casey Affleck
#21. All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
Bertrand Russell
#22. Still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else.
Charles Bukowski
#24. The best leaders are the most dedicated learners. Read great books daily.
Robin Sharma
#25. Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader's skull and heart.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
Edward Abbey
#27. Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.
Horace Mann
#29. I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#32. Robert Pattinson reads all of the time and he refers so many great books.
Kellan Lutz
#34. The reading of great books awaken and brightens the light of my soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#35. The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
Carl Sandburg
#36. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.
Charles Bukowski
#37. The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.
Russell Kirk
#38. The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the "College," in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.
Robert M. Pirsig
#39. The shortest distance between where we are today as a nation and an effective return to increasing our freedoms and widespread prosperity is for regular American citizens to read and study the great books.
Oliver DeMille
#40. The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.
Ronald Fisher
#41. Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.
Romare Bearden
#42. What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of deep reflection I know, and read great books, and make extracts."
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
"While Mary is adjusting her ideas," he continued, "let us return to Mr. Bingley.
Jane Austen
#43. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
#44. It's a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that 'I don't get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I'm never going to read any'. What a shame. All those great books that you're cutting yourself off from.
David Mitchell
#45. He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books.
Selden Edwards
#46. morigu the desacration and morigu the dead great books but series is unfinished
Mark C. Perry
#47. I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality.
Elizabeth Kostova
#48. That's one of the amazing things great books like this do - they don't just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.
Will Schwalbe
#49. A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books.
Alber Elbaz
#50. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
Orhan Pamuk
#51. I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love a good, you know, I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they've been part of my education as a woman.
Angelina Jolie
#52. Meditation has been really helpful for me and music and great books. Deep down, it's just that I feel a connection to music and books when I can find that other people have gone through similar things.
Mason Jennings
#53. Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
Matthew Specktor
#54. A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance ... Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible.
Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
#55. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable
Oscar Wilde
#57. Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
Philip Yancey
#58. Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.
Mark Twain
#59. I ignored the teasing tone of the man who stood beside me, the four-hundred-year-old Master vampire who ruled Chicago's Cadogan House and the parts of my heart that weren't devoted to great books and good pizza.
Chloe Neill
#60. We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
Joseph Joubert
#61. Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.
Bret Easton Ellis
#62. I generally travel with my laptop, a couple of great books, and my iPod.
Orlando Bloom
#63. For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it's great books, the "Upnishads", and the "Bhagavad Gita".
Jawaharlal Nehru
#64. I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.
Elon Musk
#65. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.
Jo Walton
#66. What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.
George Edward Woodberry
#67. Authors ... keep writing those great books for children and teens. It's a proven fact that those children & teens who read are less depressed than those who don't.
Timothy Pina
#70. Illuminated by the gospel, we now perceive and enjoy God's truth, goodness, and beauty - whether it's in the blazing sun of the inspired Word of God, in the moonlight of creation, or in the starlight of great books.
Tony Reinke
#71. Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey
#72. I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.
Stephen Colbert
#73. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them.
Jon Acuff
#74. Maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#76. So many great books to read, when will I finish reading all these books?
Lailah Gifty Akita
#77. look, and I'm sure you'll be amazed at the wealth of great books - usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren't just the
Steve Weber
#78. Great books help you understand, and they help you to feel understood.
John Green
#79. Making really great music, making really great films, writing great books is an antidote to all of that. And, as people, as artists, some of the massive disruption that technology is causing is so exciting, the way that people can share creativity now.
Edward Norton
#80. The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
Mortimer J. Adler
#81. I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
John Green
#82. There are a million great books out there if you just go to Google. There's a lot to pull apart. A lot of crazy, unbelievable stuff that's all completely true. I get into little obsessions, and I read everything I can find on one thing, and then I move onto another.
Caitlin Kittredge
#84. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
#85. The thing is heavy.
I'm talking the whole Harry Potter series put together heavy. Those are some great books. Totally inaccurate, but great.
Danielle Ellison
#88. It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.
Natalie Goldberg
#89. The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
Anita Brookner
#90. Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.
Dara Horn
#91. We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
B.F. Skinner
#92. Books never make religions, but religions make books. We must not forget that. No book ever created God, but God inspired all the great books. And no book ever created a soul.
Swami Vivekananda
#93. I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.
Eddie Trunk
#94. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
Augusten Burroughs
#95. The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.
Isabel Allende
#96. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.
Max Barry
#97. I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.
Laurie R. King
#98. The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.
Bruno Bettelheim
#99. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#100. No matter how much a man may study, reflect and meditate on all the books in the world, he is nothing more than a minor scribe unless he has read the great book.
Denis Diderot
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