There are many ways to get smarter - the undeniable winner would be finishing school and studies, but there are also various courses, the School of Life, just getting older and wiser, and then there are books. And while not all of them are meant to make you smarter (like the one about handcrafts from cat hair), some exist solely for this purpose. And no, we’re not talking about astrophysics textbooks, but rather various fictional stories into which the writers poured their wit and their intelligence for you to take note of. Undoubtedly, the best effect can be reached by reading the whole entirety of these books, but checking out the distilled version of just the most notable quotes is also a good start. So here’s our cue - we are presenting you our list of the best, the most intelligent, and thought-provoking book quotes known to date. Of course, not all of the smartest quotes got a chance to appear on our list; otherwise, it would be roughly the length of a giraffe’s neck, so take this article as a distillation of a distillation. This, actually, should give you a quite acceptable idea of what to expect from some of the famous books out of which we’ve plucked these intelligent quotes.
From such iconic writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, and Maya Angelou to more unexpected ones as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl - all of these quotes are quite inspiring and worthy of memorizing. And, as discussed above, these book quotes might even make you smarter by revealing some hidden secrets about our existence and the existence of things surrounding you. All that’s left to do is to greet these wise words with an open mind! Be sure to upvote the phrases that have impacted you the most or resonated with you and share these book quotes with your friends!
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"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship." - Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." - The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after." - The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?" - Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." - Animal Farm by George Orwell
"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it." - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
"What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?" - The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories." - The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"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." - Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
"We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life." - The Children Of Men by P.D. James
"One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others." - The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
"That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet." - The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
"I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way." - Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change." - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." - The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way." - The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya
"Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life." - Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
"You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day." - The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." - The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
"All human wisdom is summed up in these two words – ‘Wait and hope.’" - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Matheson clan of Scotland's motto is "Fac et Spera" - Do and Hope. Interesting.
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs." - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." - A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live." - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
"Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." - Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
"There is always something left to love." - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living." - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
"You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly." - Intimations by Zadie Smith
"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"I haven’t the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out." - Naked by David Sedaris
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
"It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you." - The Witches by Roald Dahl
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane." - Valis by Philip K. Dick
"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
"Maybe everybody in the whole damn world is scared of each other." - Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
"People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." - The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Given that the first pages of this book literally describe the rape of an underage girl, its quite difficult to believe there is a god trying to please anyone.
"Beautiful people spend time discovering what their idea of beauty on this earth is. They know themselves well enough to know what they love." - Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle
"People are less quick to applaud you as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there." - I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
"There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for." - The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat." - Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." - The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
"The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything." - City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende
"Get busy living or get busy dying." - Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
"Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life." - The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
"I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine." - Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
"Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgment, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom." - The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
"Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between." - Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
"When you start to love yourself for the first time, when you start to truly embrace who you are—flaws and all—your scars start to look a lot more like beauty marks." - Sissy by Jacob Tobia
"There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise." - Rising Strong by Brené Brown
"It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." - The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." - The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive." - Looking for Alaska by John Green
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am." - The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart." - Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
"Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." - The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
"When you play the game of thrones you win or you die." - A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." - Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget." - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
"The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past." - Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner
"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading." - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
"Time is the longest distance between two places." - The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
"And may the odds be ever in your favor." - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect." - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
"But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated." - The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
"They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it." - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
"Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass." - The Round House by Louise Erdrich
"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others." - Middlemarch by George Eliot
"She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her." - Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
"First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered." - Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
"Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy." - The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
"When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another." - What I Know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey
"Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t. I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you." - Oh! The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss
"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." - Wild by Cheryl Strayed
"Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying." - Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
"It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything." - Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
"They say you really appreciate a garden only once you reach a certain age … There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year." - Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
"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." - Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Those first nine words- these are what I strive to live by. My favorite quote among many, many wonderful quotes.
"Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing." - Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
"Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." - The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." - Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." - The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
"The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
"Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches." - The Princess Bride by William Goldman
"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price." - Rabbit, Run by John Updike
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." - The Tempest by William Shakespeare
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
"Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure." - Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like s**t." - London Fields by Martin Amis
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - Ulysses by James Joyce
"It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason." - The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
"She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars." - Stardust by Neil Gaiman
"Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are." - The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon
"I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe." - The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
"If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway." - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"We accept the love we think we deserve." - The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever." - All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
"I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?" - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it." - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
"Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different." - The Road to Character by David Brooks
"I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world." - Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy." - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you." - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
"A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill?" - East of Eden by John Steinbeck
"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." - Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." - Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
"Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day." - Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
"You pierce my soul. I am half agony. Half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever." - Persuasion by Jane Austen
"I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe." - The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places." - A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
"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." - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
"Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger." - Life of Pi by Yann Martel
"We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep." - The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time." - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
"So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible." - The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
"I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it." - The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
"Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared." - The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever." - The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
"Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." - Lord of the Flies by William Golding
"Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights." - Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves." - In A Free State by V.S. Naipaul
"No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying." - Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." - On The Road by Jack Kerouac
"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing." - Moby Dick by Herman Melville
"None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we’re safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is." - Snow Falling On Cedars by David Guterson
"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there." - American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
"Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her." - The Price Of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
"Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing." - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
"Home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family." - An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." - Life of Pi by Yann Martel
"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." - A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
"We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears." - Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
"A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life." - Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
"I don’t believe in closure. What does it really mean? Does it mean the closing of a door, the locking up of memories, the refusal to allow a flow of consciousness that may involve some measure of grief?" - On My Own by Diane Rehm
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
"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." - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
"Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete." - When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
"Human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable." - Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
"The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful." - But What if We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
"Everybody’s askin’ that. ‘What we comin’ to?’ Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way." - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart." - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
"The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude." - The Awakening by Kate Chopin
"The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet." - The Stand by Stephen King
"There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love." - I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
"The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end." - Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
"How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined." - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself." - A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
"You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter." - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever." - All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." - The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
"Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
"It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning." - The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm - yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine." - A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." - As You Like It by William Shakespeare
