"(Montag) "Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

(Clarisse)"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around .... I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal.""
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
— Vladimir Nabokov

""You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein

"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
— Albert Einstein

"You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously."
— Tristan Tzara

"talent hits the mark no one else can, genius hits the mark no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world."
— Blaise Cendrars

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

""I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe."
— V.S. Ramachandran

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

"Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult 'What is that?'"
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951)

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
— Aldous Huxley

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."
— Aldous Huxley

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
— Aldous Huxley

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."
— Aldous Huxley

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
— Aldous Huxley

"Authors can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. The meteors produce a loud momentary effect; we look up, shout 'see there!' and then they are gone for ever. The planets and comets last for a much longer time....The fixed stars alone are constant and unalterable; their position in the firmament is fixed; they have their own light and are at all times active, because they do not alter their appearance through a change in our standpoint, for they have no parallax. Unlike the others, they do not belong to one system (nation) alone, but to the world. But just because they are situated so high, their light usually requires many years before it becomes visible to the inhabitatns of earth."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
— Aldous Huxley

"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
— Arthur Schopenhauer (The Works of Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays)

"The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
— Aldous Huxley

"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."
— Aldous Huxley

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
— Aldous Huxley

"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
— Aldous Huxley

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
— Aldous Huxley