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Famous literary quotes with a biography of each quoted person.

BookBrowse's Favorite Literary Quotes

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Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.

Choose an author as you would a friend

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Every good journalist has a novel in him - which is an excellent place for it.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think the university stifles writers...

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.

Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success

From the moment I picked your book up...

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil...

Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.

Happiness belongs to the self sufficient

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming

He who opens a door, closes a prison

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way.

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are kept.

I like a thin book because it will steady a table...

I write to add to the beauty that now belongs to me

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.
  • Book Jacket
    Wandering Stars
    by Tommy Orange
    Tommy Orange follows There There with a powerful multi-generational story of survival and legacy.
  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

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