Liberty's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 60)

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

tags: books, soul
11,473 people liked it

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

tags: lies, lying, memory, truth
9,706 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,623 people liked it

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

tags: humor, insanity, life
9,878 people liked it

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,358 people liked it

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, classic, humor
5,694 people liked it

"You always get weirdos like Edward who seem to attract women for some reason. If Edward wasn’t a fictional character and you met him in reality he is like one of those guys who would probably be an axe murderer or something."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga)

tags: twilight
5,705 people liked it

"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

tags: books, reading
2,748 people liked it

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, health, humor, misprints
2,463 people liked it

"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 (A Man Without a Country)

tags: america, books, politics
1,047 people liked it

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

tags: bookroom, books, wisdom
1,405 people liked it

"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 W. Eliot

tags: books, friends, reading, teachers
727 people liked it

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all."
— Abraham Lincoln

tags: books, originality, unique
519 people liked it

"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)

tags: books, reading
417 people liked it

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

tags: books, writing
352 people liked it

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

tags: books, fiction, literature
354 people liked it

"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

tags: books, obsession
270 people liked it

"He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot."
— Arabic proverb

tags: books, borrowing, lending
138 people liked it

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."
— Hermann Hesse

tags: books
90 people liked it

"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)

tags: books, reading, stories, story
59 people liked it

"What refuge is there for the victim who is possessed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to read a hundred?"
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

tags: books, read
67 people liked it

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."
— W.H. Auden

tags: books, forget, memory
38 people liked it

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose."
— Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)

tags: books, novels, reading
24 people liked it

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."
— A.C. Grayling (The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century)

tags: books, reflection, truth
18 people liked it

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

tags: books, library
3,258 people liked it

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, friends, friendship, life
4,007 people liked it

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: books, friends, novelist, quotes
1,682 people liked it

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

tags: books, humor
1,248 people liked it

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, morality, reading
996 people liked it

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

tags: books, inspirational, life, reading
969 people liked it

"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."
— Bertrand Russell

tags: books, humor
838 people liked it

"A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar."
— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

tags: books, humor
549 people liked it

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
— Saul Bellow

tags: books, libraries
203 people liked it

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
— Christopher Morley

tags: bibliophilia, books
133 people liked it

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
— Robertson Davies

tags: architecture, books, reading
115 people liked it

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

tags: books, reading
2,157 people liked it

"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

tags: books, reading
894 people liked it

"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)

tags: books, reading
790 people liked it

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: books, fire, star, universe
422 people liked it

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."
— Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote)

tags: books, humor, reading
319 people liked it

"Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

tags: books, poetry
166 people liked it

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

tags: books
112 people liked it

"She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page."
— Jane Hamilton

tags: books
48 people liked it

"Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

tags: books, life
48 people liked it

"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."
— John Witherspoon

tags: books
30 people liked it

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
"
— Edward P. Morgan

tags: books
22 people liked it

"A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand."
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

tags: books
21 people liked it

"We are made whole
By books, as by great spaces and the stars"
— Mary Carolyn Davies

tags: books
11 people liked it

"Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.

"Books are humanity in print. "
— Barbara W. Tuchman

tags: books, civilization, humanity
8 people liked it