128 Inspiring Book Quotes

In the pages of a book, we often find more than just stories; we find pieces of wisdom, inspiration, and timeless truths that resonate with our own experiences. Books have been a source of motivation for centuries, offering insights that ignite our imagination and encourage us to see the world from new perspectives. Today, we bring you a curated collection of the top 128 inspiring book quotes. Whether you're seeking a burst of motivation, a spark of creativity, or a comforting reminder that you're not alone, these quotes stand ready to uplift and inspire you at every turn. Dive into the timeless words of renowned authors and let their wisdom guide you toward a brighter tomorrow.

1. “A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.” - Stéphane Mallarme

2. “From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.” - Charles Dickens

3. “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

4. “nights and days came and passedand summer and winterand the sun and the windand the rain.and it was good to be a little islanda part of the worldand a world of its ownall surrounded by the bright blue sea.” - Golden MacDonald

5. “I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .” - Kurt Vonnegut

6. “I wanted to live among books.” - Alberto Manguel

7. “In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.” - Anne Fadiman

8. “One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. ” - Alberto Manguel

9. “In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. ” - Alberto Manguel

10. “Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. ” - Alberto Manguel

11. “Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.” - Anne Fadiman

12. “Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?” - Virginia Woolf

13. “When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” - Oscar Wilde

14. “If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.” - Mark Glamack

15. “Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book.” - Julia Quinn

16. “A good friend of mine once said, "I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.” - Marion Dane Bauer

17. “Sometimes, before you make any plans or resolutions, before you declare your heroic intent to persevere, you just have to cry.” - Jaclyn Dolamore

18. “Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling” - Tony DeLiso

19. “Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.” - Adolf Hitler

20. “We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.” - Cecelia Ahern

21. “Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.” - Daniel Keyes

22. “If you fail to report within the next 12 hours. you will be terminated. If you attack any humans, you will be terminated. If you attempt to remove the tracking device, you will be terminated. We look forward to working with you.” - Kiersten White

23. “It was odd, (Tessa thought), what brought out tenderness in people.” - Cassandra Clare

24. “B looked down the shaft, at a metal ladder and darkness beyond. "Me first?"Of course. You're the apprentice, so you always go first into the unknown. If anyone's going to be eaten by a grue, it should be you."Tough job. But at least the hours are terrible.” - T.A. Pratt

25. “A body is a body." Viscarro shrugged his bony shoulders. "Dead, alive, alive, dead. I fail to see the importance of the distinction."Yeah? So you'd just as soon fuck a living person as a dead one? What's the point of the distinction? Oh, right-one's normal, and one's called necrophilia."Viscarro sighed. "Touche, I suppose.” - T.A. Pratt

26. “a book is a box of words until you open it.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

27. “I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.” - Helene Hanff

28. “Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.” - Pseudonymous Bosch

29. “Your party kicked so much ass!Even though you suck so much! It's like, instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!” - John Green

30. “After the bitching I'd done to Abe about going to remote, crappy places, I should have been excited about the prospect of going to Sin City.” - Richelle Mead

31. “Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.” - David Almond

32. “WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.” - Edmond Jabès

33. “Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

34. “Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.” - Jodi Picoult

35. “The map was just an accessory. She knew exactly where she was.” - Galt Niederhoffer

36. “I beg your pardon?” Catherine interrupted. “Are you implying that women have poor judgment?”“In these matters, yes.” Leo gestured to Christopher. “Just look at the fellow, standing there like a bloody Greek god. Do you think she chose him because of his intellect?”“I graduated from Cambridge,” Christopher said acidly. “Should I have brought my diploma?”“In this family,” Cam interrupted, “there is no requirement of a university degree to prove one’s intelligence. Lord Ramsay is a perfect example of how one has nothing to do with the other.” - Lisa Kleypas

37. “The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover.” - Susan Straight

38. “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.” - J.M. Coetzee

39. “I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.” - Dorothy Parker

40. “A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there.” - J.R. Ward

41. “An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.” - Malcolm X

42. “Don't judge a book by its cover” - George Eliot

43. “As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.” - Brendan Jack

44. “The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” - Jaron Lanier

45. “[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.” - Michel Foucault

46. “A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.” - Laura Ingalls Wilder

47. “Besides the alternate universe offered by a book, the quiet space of a museum was my favorite place to go. My mom said I was an escapist at heart . . . that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one. It’s true that I’ve always been able to yank myself out of this world and plunge myself into another.” - Amy Plum

48. “Not matter what your sacred or religious book is, it's not how well you know the book, it's how well you're in alignment with the author.” - Steve Maraboli

49. “Nos dimos la mano y nos separamos. Él se dirigió hacia su nuevo mundo y yo volví a mi lodazal.” - Haruki Murakami

50. “Steal not this book for fear of shameFor on it is the owners nameAnd when you die the Lord will sayWhere is the book you stole awayAnd when you say you do not knowThe Lord will say go down below.” - L.M. Montgomery

51. “Un livre est un peu de silence entre les mains du lecteur.Celui qui écrit calme.Celui qui le lit ne rompt pas le silence.” - Pascal Quignard

52. “Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.” - Pascal Quignard

53. “There’s no better way to get to know a city than to walk its streets. A place will reveal its soul through its sights, sounds and smells, and eventually, it’ll teach you its rhythm.” - Henry Mosquera

54. “People have incredible nerve to do terrible things, but never actually admit to them.” - Henry Mosquera

55. “Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!...You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.” - Robert Walser

56. “[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.” - Simon Van Booy

57. “Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.” - Henry Mosquera

58. “Any self-defense class worth its salt will tell you thatyou don’t pull out a weapon unless you intend to use it.The same should apply to ballsy remarks.” - Henry Mosquera

59. “Still. Four words.And I didn’t realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:Dear Neil,If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children’s area, what would it be?Thanks!LynnI pondered a bit. I’d said a lot about books and kids’ reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote: I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned: “… and then w” - Neil Gaiman

60. “I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other."He's right. We did.The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.” - Suzanne Collins

61. “People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]” - Edward Abbey

62. “I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.” - j.m.g. le clezio

63. “My father once told me that it’s not enough for a man to be lucky; that a guy has to know when that streak is on for him.” - Henry Mosquera

64. “It was cliche, he knew, but he meant it classic.” - S.E. Hinton

65. “Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding.” - Theodore Dreiser

66. “Don't die a pauper, don't die a commoner and a weakling.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

67. “Everyone that enters through Him is secured and the person shall find pastures for himself. Jesus really cares!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

68. “We cannot prevail by our own might or strength, we need to plug on to the source of our strength so that we will remain resourceful always.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

69. “When we are connected to the source, we will not be afraid of any task set before us.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

70. “You may not attain the highest height with one leap but my dear; you will reach your destination.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

71. “God wants all man's attention, thoughts and focus to be on Him.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

72. “Dare to be different. Represent your maker well and you will forever abide in the beautiful embrace of his loving arms.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

73. “The presence of God is so important in the life of believers. There is abundance of all you need to make your life comfortable in His presence.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

74. “The presence of the Lord destroys a life of struggle. You will struggle until you encounter His presence.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

75. “God is never tired of bringing the sun out every morning, taking it in the evenings and bringing out the moon.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

76. “You recreate your world to your taste with God's Word in your mouth.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

77. “Don't say negative things about your spouse and children.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

78. “Your status has changed. Your Name is changed! You are a new creation.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

79. “You are not permitted to live and die as a non-entity because you have encountered the greatness that is associated with Christ.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

80. “Don't let any situation intimidate you anymore, don't accept defeat anymore.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

81. “Be a King. Dare to be Different, dare to manifest your greatness.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

82. “Don't die without fulfilling your purpose.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

83. “It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.” - Augustine of Hippo

84. “So what do you think?’ He asked, holding up the book.‘I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,’ I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. ‘The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-’‘Sybil.’‘He grabs Sybil’s ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,’ I continued. ‘He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame.” - J.D. Gallagher

85. “It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.” - S. A. Bodeen

86. “remember when God has answered you, it no longer matters who has been against you but for Him to answer you and change your story, you have to make up your mind to disobey the wrong order, change the status quo and BE DIFFERENT!” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

87. “A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands, said Haldon.” - George R.R. Martin

88. “It's risky most of the time, but its better to listen to your heart.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett

89. “يا أيها الأغنياء المترفون، اذكروا أن في الاأرض من إخوانكم، من أبناء أبيكم آددم، وأمكم حواء، من لا يجد في هذا البرد الذي يجمد النفوس دثاراً من الصوف يتدثر به، وغرفة محكمة يأوي إليها، وناراً موقودة يتدفأ بها، ومن لا يعرف من أين يأتي بالمال الذي يشتري به الخبز يسد به جوعه، والدواء يدفع به مرضه ...” - علي الطنطاوي

90. “Nullus est liber tam malus ut non aliqua parte prosit - There is no book so bad that it is not profitable on some part.” - Pliny the Younger

91. “The gold of life is for those bold and brave in life.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

92. “In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.” - John Bright

93. “Tears were frozen to the book theif's face.” - Markus Zusak

94. “Life can’t be divided into chapters...only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how.” - Colleen Hoover

95. “Why certainly, words possess power.  They do!  But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

96. “. . . you don’t need a happy ending to move onto a happy beginning.” - Krystal McLean

97. “Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.” - John Green

98. “An average man is egoistic, proud and has strong self esteem. They always require partners who massage their ego not those who will drag their ego to the mud.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

99. “When a man finds this kind of woman, he will go all out for her knowing that she will not be a letdown.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

100. “Men love women who are courageous for it means they can go all the way with him in his pursuit of his good dreams and intentions.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

101. “A responsible woman is one who sees opportunities of service and responds to them quickly. In her dwells the ability to see and respond to opportunities.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

102. “A responsible woman doesn’t see opportunities and needs and look the other way pretending not to see them rather she gets to work to ensure things are done properly and her man succeeds in his endeavours.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

103. “When one star sets, a million spring forth.” - Vincent Lowry

104. “Ladies, get confident about yourselves, build up your self-worth and esteem, love yourself and be proud of your achievements and your man will adore you for life.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

105. “If a lioness spends her hours pacing back and forth in a cage of gold with the finest meats at her disposal, does that make her any less of a prisoner? If that same feline’s fangs are filed down to blunt, un-tearing teeth and her roar is silenced, can she still be called a lioness?” - Kristen Reed

106. “I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.” - Daphne du Maurier

107. “Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.” - David Mitchell

108. “We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.” - Madeleine L'Engle

109. “Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.” - James Michener

110. “She sighed and looked at him sympathetically. 'Cool flame tricks aside, there's no competition.'He lifted his eyebrow. 'Library wins?''Every single time.” - Elizabeth Hunter

111. “I'm ready for another adventure now, take me far away please!Ok one more... But then you have to read to me!” - Joseph Gordon-Levitt

112. “The stars sparkled above the mist shrouded tents and caravans of the carnival. The night crackled with an odd vibration, as if a veil of peculiarity settled over the company.” - A.F. Stewart

113. “140 karakter kali 10 twit per hari, kalikan lagi seminggu. Sudah berapa halaman naskah yang kau dapatkan, Duhai?” - Ali Zaenal

114. “There is a ladder to Success! Choose to climb it.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

115. “Move forward for forward is progress but circles are movement.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

116. “Life is beautiful if you take the best option.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

117. “It turns out horrendous when you choose the wrong options.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

118. “Choices, options, decisions abound. Choose right, take the best option and decide well.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

119. “Avoid conflicts, Embrace cordiality.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

120. “Stand out tall amidst challenges! Dwarf all irrelevant voices.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

121. “Drown those degrading thoughts.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

122. “Shine forth your light before all beings.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

123. “Desire to give and not always receive.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

124. “The giver is the blessed! The receiver stands still.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

125. “Desire to impact lives! Change destinies and make dreams come true.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

126. “You are created with a mandate! You have all you need to fulfill it.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

127. “Anyaele Sam Chiyson Leadership Law of Responsibility: Great leaders greet their geniuses through their greatest power of choice, principle-based living and highest means of expressing their voice.” - Anyaele Sam Chiyson

128. “There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!” - E.A. Bucchianeri