59 Inspiring Literature Quotes

Literature has the power to transport us to distant worlds, evoke deep emotions, and offer profound insights into the human condition. From the timeless works of Shakespeare to contemporary masterpieces, certain quotes resonate with us long after we've turned the last page. In this blog post, we've gathered a curated collection of 59 inspiring literature quotes that capture the essence of what it means to be human. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or a new perspective, these words from some of the greatest authors will speak to your soul. So, grab a cup of tea, settle into your favorite reading nook, and let these literary gems inspire you.

1. “Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough.” - William Shakespeare

2. “I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.” - Ray Bradbury

3. “Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.” - Lawrence Clark Powell

4. “Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.” - Edward De Bono

5. “When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.” - Christopher Morley

6. “Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.” - Diane Setterfield

7. “After all, tomorrow is another day!” - Margaret Mitchell

8. “She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.” - Marcel Proust

9. “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” - Emily Dickinson

10. “Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.” - Charlotte Brontë

11. “أسمع من المحيط إلى الخليج أن من لا يقدر على إفهامنا لم تحل معادلات الدرجة الثانية بالطريقة التي تحل بها يخرف حول ابستمولوجية السقوط الحر ونسبية اينشتاين خلطا بين التعليقات الإيديولوجية والنفسية على مايزعم جاريا في وعي العلماء وتصوراتهم وبين فهم آليات الإبداع العلمي وقوانينه” - أبو يعرب المرزوقي

12. “A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” - Edith Wharton

13. “[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)” - Jess C. Scott

14. “I love and hate this place because it is full of words.” - Markus Zusak

15. “The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.” - Julio Cortazar

16. “But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.” - Alexander McCall Smith

17. “When The Journal of Words compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that Pride and Prejudice was number twelve?" She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. "And do you know where Jane Eyre was?" she asked. She looked at the four of them in turn, but nobody answered her. "Number fifty-two!" she shrieked. "Fifty-two! Below that pornographic travesty Lolita!" She spat the title as if it were poison. "Below Huckleberry Finn! Below Ulysses. Have you ever tried to read Ulysses? Have you ever finished it? No, you haven't. No one has. They just carry it around and lie about having read it.” - Michael Thomas Ford

18. “The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.” - Machado de Assis

19. “From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.” - Betty Smith

20. “When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day.When your tale's got little in itCrowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short--a fleeting vapor--Don't you fill the whole blamed paperWith a tale which, at a pinch, Could be cornered in an inch!Boil her down until she simmers,Polish her until she glimmers.” - Joel Chandler Harris

21. “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.” - Gaston Bachelard

22. “I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow” - Billy Collins

23. “And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.” - Richard Mitchell

24. “All hen are created equal but some have more feather than others.” - Viken Berberian

25. “Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.” - Jorge Luis Borges

26. “Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.” - Mary Swan

27. “You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

28. “Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.” - Walter Kirn

29. “Human beings have their great chance in the novel.” - E.M. Forster

30. “Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?” - Roman Payne

31. “My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing. [...] Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one's writing and one's beloved)--these have nothing to do with gender. [...] The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It's her own, it's uniquely hers. Not because she is a "female" but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more "feminine" in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today....But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. [...]” - Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

32. “[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.” - Bart D. Ehrman

33. “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.” - David Shields

34. “You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.” - Al Pacino

35. “I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.” - Sylvia Plath

36. “...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.” - Saadat Hasan Manto

37. “But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.” - David Mitchell

38. “Writing poetry is a state of free float” - Margaret Atwood

39. “The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.” - Victoria Hislop

40. “وحده البكاء والحزن كان يحتضن وحدتي، وحدتي التي وددت لو تخترقها بكلماتك، لو تسمح لي على الأقل بأن أحبك على طريقي، بأن أقول لك كل شيء عني، بأن تتقبل ثرثراتي ولا تتمنى أن أختفي من الكون أنا التي صارت أمنيتي الوحيدة أن يخلو الكون من الناس وتبقى أنت.” - لطيفة الحاج

41. “When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature” - TODOROV TZVETAN

42. “Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.” - Francine Prose

43. “There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.” - Mizuki Nomura

44. “The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.” - Oakley Hall

45. “In the essence of truth lies deceit.” - Dejan Stojanovic

46. “Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

47. “You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.” - Dejan Stojanovic

48. “Without space, there is no time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

49. “To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.” - Dejan Stojanovic

50. “In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.” - Dejan Stojanovic

51. “Unjustified ambition kills value,Kills someone else's desire to fly, Cuts their wings, sucks their air.If there is nothing else, it eats its own life.” - Dejan Stojanovic

52. “There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.” - Dejan Stojanovic

53. “You are hurrying to the sweet place, To the nonsense chasing your spirit And in the nonsense you look for answers.” - Dejan Stojanovic

54. “He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.” - Dejan Stojanovic

55. “All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.” - Dejan Stojanovic

56. “Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.” - David Foster Wallace

57. “I don't fear death--I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.” - Amy Elizabeth Smith

58. “It was. It will never be again. Remember.” - Paul Auster

59. “Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.” - Tom Spanbauer