I Rounded Up The 53 Greatest Book Quotes Of All Time Instead Of Reading More
"All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote."
That's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1859 essay "Quotation and Originality." It's not from a book so I couldn't include it on this list, but it does a pretty great job of celebrating a good quote.
Whether we're shouting out our favorite writers or challenging ourselves with words that we can't get out of our heads, everyone loves a good quote. These are 53 of the best.
53."I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world." ―Albert Camus, The Stranger
52."What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song." ―Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
51."We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday." ―Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
50."Travel far enough, you meet yourself." ―David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
49."There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth." ―Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
48."Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry." ―J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
47."Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful." ―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
46."Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day." ―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
45."One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." ―Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
44."I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race — that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant." ―Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
43."It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way." ―Cheryl Strayed, Wild
42."He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life." ―James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
41."Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting." ―Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
40."If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives." ―Daniel Handler, The Ersatz Elevator
39."If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content." ―Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
38."He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink." ―Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
37."For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons." ―Douglas Adams,The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
36."It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." ―Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
35."Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for." ―Joseph Heller, Catch-22
34."When you find out you can live without it, go along not thinking about it." ―Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
33."Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud." ―Yann Martel, Life of Pi
32."Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future." ―Alan Moore, Watchmen
31."Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready." ―Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
30."To die of love is to live by it." ―Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
29."Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become." ―Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship)
28."I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too." ―Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
27."As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." ―Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
26."One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again." ―C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
25."It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything." ―Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
24."I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'" ―Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
23."Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia." ―Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
22."It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." ―Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
21."The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water." ―Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
20."Who, being loved, is poor?" ―Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
19."Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." ―Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), The Lorax
18."Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." ―Neil Gaiman, Coraline
17."Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." ―Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
16."If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad." ―Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
15."All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." ―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
14."I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." ―Frank Herbert, Dune
13."I like good strong words that mean something." ―Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
12."Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love." ―Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
11."Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are." ―Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
10."Where there is equality there can be sanity." ―George Orwell, 1984
9."I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world." ―Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
8."This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man." ―William Shakespeare, Hamlet
7."Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined." ―Toni Morrison, Beloved
6."Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." ―Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
5."What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic." ―David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
4."Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition." ―James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
3."So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." ―F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
2."You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […], until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." ―Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
1."There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ―Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
