Big Books of 2026

Ben > Ben's Quotes

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  • #1
    Samuel Beckett
    “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
    ― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
    tags: failure, perseverance
    1889 likes

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  • #2
    Samuel Beckett
    “You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
    ― Samuel Beckett
    tags: life, planets, space-travel
    1508 likes

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  • #3
    Philip Pullman
    “I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.

    [Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]”
    ― philip pullman
    tags: basis, beauty, belief, book, books, children-s-books, offense, paraphrased, philip-pullman, plot, value, wisdom, young-adult
    226 likes

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  • #4
    Terry Pratchett
    “Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
    ― Terry Pratchett, Jingo
    tags: humor, proverb
    12932 likes

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  • #5
    Terry Pratchett
    “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
    ― Terry Pratchett, Diggers
    tags: humor, open-mind, thinking
    21437 likes

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  • #6
    Stephen R. Donaldson
    “Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.”
    ― Stephen R. Donaldson, Reave the Just and Other Tales
    39 likes

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  • #7
    Stephen R. Donaldson
    “It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate.”
    ― Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
    tags: compulsion, freedom, giving
    28 likes

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  • #8
    Confucius
    “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
    ― Confucius
    tags: individuality, inspiration, validation
    864 likes

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  • #9
    Albert Einstein
    “Necessity is the mother of all invention.”
    ― Albert Einstein
    50 likes

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  • #10
    Samuel Beckett
    “Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
    ― Samuel Beckett
    1852 likes

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  • #11
    Theodore Roosevelt
    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
    ― Theodore Roosevelt
    tags: inspirational, politics, presidential
    8501 likes

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  • #12
    Theodore Roosevelt
    “The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”
    ― Theodore Roosevelt
    tags: americanism, duty, nationalism
    519 likes

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  • #13
    Theodore Roosevelt
    “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
    ― Theodore Roosevelt
    tags: empathy, wisdom
    571 likes

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  • #14
    W. Somerset Maugham
    “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
    ― W. Somerset Maugham
    tags: writing
    3852 likes

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  • #15
    W. Somerset Maugham
    “The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”
    ― W. Somerset Maugham
    tags: love
    1547 likes

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  • #16
    W. Somerset Maugham
    “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
    ― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You
    tags: bibliotherapy, books, escape, good-habits, life, pleasure, reading, refuge
    2255 likes

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  • #17
    Harlan Ellison
    “I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
    Adult. You have become adult.”
    ― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions
    tags: inspirational, pain, philosophy
    1059 likes

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  • #18
    Harlan Ellison
    “The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
    ― Harlan Ellison
    817 likes

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  • #19
    Winston S. Churchill
    “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
    ― Winston S. Churchill
    tags: truth
    6764 likes

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  • #20
    Edgar Allan Poe
    “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
    ― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
    8629 likes

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  • #21
    Douglas Adams
    “The story so far:
    In the beginning the Universe was created.
    This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
    ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    tags: humor, scifi
    23459 likes

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  • #22
    William Gibson
    “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
    ― William Gibson
    tags: future, planning
    1080 likes

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  • #23
    Charles Bukowski
    “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
    ― Charles Bukowski
    tags: atheism, religion
    8907 likes

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  • #24
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
    ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
    tags: action, attitude, choice, imagination, inspiration, life, pretend
    18011 likes

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  • #25
    “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”
    ― Ellen DeGeneres
    tags: age, exercise, family, grandmothers, grandparents, humor, walking
    2444 likes

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  • #26
    E.M. Forster
    “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
    ― E.M. Forster
    tags: education, educational, inspirational, inspiring, learning, mentoring
    1846 likes

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  • #27
    Chip Heath
    “The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.”
    ― Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
    tags: attention, habit, pattern
    106 likes

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  • #28
    Stephen King
    “Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
    ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
    tags: bad-writing, fiction, good-writing, writing
    225 likes

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  • #29
    Stephen King
    “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
    ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
    tags: books, magic, reading
    17573 likes

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  • #30
    Stephen King
    “Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
    ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
    tags: writing
    1498 likes



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