Quotes about Books
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.
- Thomas Merton
Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them.
- Thomas Merton
but the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: "There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ
- Thomas Merton
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- CS Lewis
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
- John Milton
Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.
- John Milton
The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me.
- Toni Morrison
If a man is known by the company he keeps, so also his character is reflected in the books he reads.
- J. Oswald Sanders
It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.
- JM Coetzee
Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
- Stephen Jay Gould
You can only learn so much from books. You can only learn so much from education. Ultimately, it is the wisdom of God that will carry you through in the toughest situations of life.
- Ravi Zacharias