200+ Unforgettable Book Quotes From Beloved Classics

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.

She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.