Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
Quote and book title, please!
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Final score:
82points
RELATED:
#2
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
-Albus Dumbledore
Harry Potter
Final score:
74points
#3
“If you live to be a hundred, I hope I live to be a hundred minus one day, so that I never have to live a day without you.” Winnie the Pooh
A. A. Milne
Final score:
63points
#4
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Final score:
60points
#5
“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't you think?”
― Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Final score:
46points
#6
"I've seen boredom. And I've seen excitement. And boredom was best."
Rincewind, wizzard, in "Colours of Magic" (Terry Pratchet)
Final score:
40points
#7
“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.”
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
Final score:
40points
#8
i survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me
Aelij Galathynius
Final score:
36points
#9
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Dune Frank Herbert
Final score:
32points
#10
Milo: “I never knew words could be so confusing.”
Tock: “Only when you use a lot to say a little.”
-Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Final score:
31points
#11
"The act of opening the Bible lets the devil know that you exist." -Christopher Moore, can't remember which book but it has creeped me out for years
Final score:
30points
#12
“When given the choice between being right or being kind choose kind.”
-Wonder by RJ Palacio
But to be honest I like any quote from that book
Final score:
27points
#13
“Reputation is what others know of you. Honour is what you know of yourself.” Lois McMaster Bujold - A Civil Campaign
Final score:
24points
#14
‘You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing’-E.B White, Charlotte’s Web
Final score:
23points
#15
"The ships hung in the sky, in much the way that bricks don't"
Hitchhikers Guide. Not inspirational at all, but it's a great anti-simile.
Final score:
22points
#16
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Thief of Time by Sir Terry Pratchett
Final score:
21points
#17
"Takes all kinds of people to make up a world" - some Kurt Vonnegut book
Final score:
20points
#18
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
- Rilke
Final score:
20points
#19
"All that glisters is not gold
Often you have heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Had thou been as wise as bold
Young in limbs, thy judgement old
Thy answer had not been enscrolled.
Fare thee well, they suit is cold."
--the Golden Casket, the Merchant of Venice.
"Our cause is no more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
--Screwtape, from the Screwtape Letters. (Truly an excellent book, I definitely recommend it).
Final score:
19points
#20
“The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.” Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult.
Final score:
19points
#21
“Alas! Ear wax!” Albums Dumbledore Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
I use this quote way more than I probably should.
Final score:
18points
#22
“But in the end it's only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.” - The Lord of the Rings
Final score:
17points
#23
"I will take any monsters my mind will give me, but I will not be a monster myself."
"one should never save cake for later when it can be eaten now."
"I might as well be crazy, for everyone tells me so"
-winter, from various books in the lunar chronicles
Final score:
16points
#24
what is essential is invisible to the eye.
The Little Prince
Final score:
15points
Virginie Michaud 3 years ago (edited)
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. 😁 The second part is necessary to complete the quote. And you should hear it read in French if you can, the rythm and musicality adds to the poetry and beauty of this great work from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
#25
"As the entire moon is reflected in a single dewdrop, so the entire
universe is reflected in the mind of man."
- Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen
Final score:
14points
#26
“Goddamn money, it always ends up making you blue as hell.”
-Holden Caulfield
Catcher in the Rye
Final score:
14points
#27
“Today is going to be a good day and here’s why. Today, today at least, you’re you and that’s enough.”
Dear Evan Hansen
(It’s such a good book! Please read it!)
Final score:
14points
#28
Always.
-Severus Snape, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.
Final score:
14points
#29
"You have to flaunt the weird, my friends."
-Alex Fierro, supreme being with no need for fixed binary gender, as that is of lesser beings.
Final score:
14points
#30
A broken heart cannot fly,
But who decides the time to die.
- Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.
A beautiful book.
Final score:
13points
#31
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
1984, George Orwell
Final score:
12points
#32
We are men of action, lies do not become us.
- Princess Bride, S.Morgenstern/William Goldman
Final score:
12points
#33
Isabelle: "What do you know? You weren't even paying attention."
Alec: "I was. I said Jace was right."
Jace: "Yeah, but there's like a 90% chance of me being right most of the time, so that's not proof you were listening, that's just a good guess."
- the mortal instruments, cassandra clare
Final score:
11points
#34
i survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me
Aelin Galathynius
Final score:
11points
#35
“All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.” - Sarah Harding to Kelly Curtis “The Lost World” by Michael Crichton
Final score:
11points
Merino (Submission author) 3 years ago (edited)
If you haven't read the Jurassic Park books, and you liked the movies, I highly suggest you read them.
#36
“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
It has always resonated with me, and it's my favorite novel.
Final score:
11points
#37
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
-YODA
Final score:
11points
#38
“If you try, you might fail,
But if you don't try, you'll never succeed.”
-Thomas A. Knight, author of the “Time Weaver Chronicles” and don’t remember which book. It’s my favorite quote.
Final score:
11points
#39
All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.” ― Paulo Coelho, Aleph
Final score:
11points
Gold Medal Dyke 3 years ago
Your first word put me in mind of a song I love, written/proforma by Dar Williams
#40
“Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed”
-Ophelia,
Hamlet
Final score:
10points
#41
"I wanted to get in my truck and bang down corrugated roads, grind gears, thunder across plank bridges. I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time."
'Jolie Blon's Bounce' by James Lee Burke
My family came from the bayous of Louisiana, and this particular passage hits me way down deep in that Ubi Sunt sorta way.
Final score:
10points
#42
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Final score:
10points
#43
"of course duct tape works on mars. duct tape works everywhere. it is magic and should be worshipped"
The Martian
Final score:
10points
#44
“Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up.” - Your Name
Final score:
9points
#45
“I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me, sings no more.”
-Fifteen Sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Final score:
8points
#46
Don't do what you can't undo without considering everything you can't do once you've done it
Final score:
8points
Rachknits (Submission author) 3 years ago
By Robin Hobb Assassin's Apprentice - for some reason it wouldn't let me write this in the actual post
#47
"You never have forgave me...
No matter what happens from here on out,
I will always love you."
- Itachi (Naruto Shippuden)
Final score:
7points
Jackie Porter 3 years ago
Itachi Uchiha is my favourite character and this part always made me cry
#48
"The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault."
- from Blood Rites (a Dresden Files novel) by Jim Butcher
Final score:
7points
#49
"Domesticated dogs still bite." -Philza Minecraft, 'passerine', on AO3
Final score:
7points
#50
TANSTAAFL*....Robert Heinlein. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
*There ain't no such as a free lunch
Final score:
7points
#51
"Why do clothes never have enough pockets? Clothes should always have lots of pockets. The more pockets, the better!" - Sophie Foster (Shannon Messenger), Keeper of the Lost Cities - Flashback
This is pure truth. Excellent series, so many more amazing quotes, but this is the one I quote the most.
Final score:
7points
#52
We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts we make the world
From the Dhammapada
I never ran into a quote that gave me such a feeling of joy and freedom as that one.
Final score:
7points
Chris Martin 3 years ago
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Hamlet. Shakespeare must have read the Dhammapada.
#53
"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."
"It is the time you have waited for your rose that makes it so special"
-The Little Prince
Final score:
6points
#54
“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.” - The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham.
Final score:
6points
#55
"In a garden full of violent flowers, the lawn has nowhere to hide." - Me (From a book I'm writing)
Final score:
6points
#56
“Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway. I’ll love you until my very last breath. Every beat of my heart is yours. I don’t want to die without you knowing that.” - MAXON (The One)
Final score:
6points
#57
“I thought if I could get into Harvard, everyone would finally say she’s okay, she’s a good kid. But now you’re yelling at me, and soon your sister will probably call and yell at me because of what I did to Grandma and Papa, and your whole family is going to say that I’m an awful kid, but in the meantime I’m trying so hard. I’m trying so hard. Trying so hard. Trying…”
-Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, Elizabeth Wurtzel
This scene was so poignant, and very much a help to understand and work through my own past struggles. I highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with or knows someone who struggles with mental health.
Final score:
5points
#58
he is no fool that gives up what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose. Jim Elliot-
Final score:
5points
#60
"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty."
-Everything is illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
Final score:
5points
#61
Never under estimate the power of human stupidity.
Quoted by many over the years, but my fav is from:
Time Enough For Love by
Robert Heinlein
Final score:
5points
#62
“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
-Kaz Brekker, Six of Crows Duology (Leigh Bardugo)
Final score:
5points
#63
“to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.”
-The Ivy Crown
A poem by William Carlos Williams
Final score:
4points
#64
Never sniff a gift fish. Patrick F. McManus
Final score:
4points
#65
Don‘t know the exact quote in English, but probably something like: „Only those without guilt/sin, may throw rocks/the first stone“. To me, this is the wisest, most life-loving advice...
Final score:
4points
#66
Out beyond the ideas of rightdoings and wrongdoings there is a field, I'll meet u thr. -Zibran
Final score:
4points
#67
at first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. what we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone. for i still love you with the whole of my heart. i still love you. and sometimes, my friend, the love that i have and cant give to you, crushed the breath from my chest. sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep. - Shantaram
Final score:
4points
#68
"when people say impossible they usually mean improbable!"
Nikolai lantsov / sturmhond
Seige and storm
(exclamation mark because they are about a thousand feet in the air on.... Wait for it. A flying boat.)
Final score:
3points
#69
"Stand strong, and walk like you belong, and no one will be any the wiser." The Luck Uglies
Final score:
3points
#70
"Great, let's round up all the useless cats and hope a tree falls on them."
-Jayfeather, Warriors, Power of Three, The Sight
Final score:
3points
#71
"Get to know yourself" - what good is that? What if you get to know yourself and find out you're a total harpy?'
The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore.
Final score:
3points
#72
"The world stands out on either side/ No wider than the heart is wide; / Above the world is stretched the sky/ No higher than the soul is high. / The heart can push the sea and land / Farther away on either hand; / The soul can split the sky in two, / And let the face of God shine through." Renascence, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Final score:
3points
#73
Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon - Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz
Final score:
3points
#74
'She's not here. Not as I remember here anyway. She's something else now, some part of this swirling light and energy I don't understand.'
- The House with Chicken Legs (Sophie Anderson)
This part of the story is where the main character (Marinka) learns that her Babushka (Baba Yaga) is gone, her soul has returned to the stars. I like the phrase because the story is about moving on and accepting life but also creating your own destiny and finding out who you are, which is nicely summed up here.
Final score:
3points
#75
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything. Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.
~Sal Paradise
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Every single line of this book can be a quote anyway, but this gives me a sense I can't even explain.
Final score:
2points
#76
‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.’
(Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne) Persuasion by Jane Austen
Final score:
2points
#77
“And I felt, I don't know, connected with him.
Not in the quantum sense in which everything was connected to everything else, and in which every atom spoke to and negotiated with every other atom. No. This was on another level. A level far, far harder to understand.”
The Humans, Matt Haig
Final score:
2points
#78
"I do love nothing in the world so well as you - is that not strange?"
Much ado about nothing
Shakespeare
Final score:
2points
#79
"Beneath the darkest of visages, usually gleams the softest of hearts."
~This is Go
Nikki Sixx
Final score:
2points
#80
“History huh, bet we could make some.”
Red, White, and Royal Blue
Final score:
2points
#81
literally EVERYTHING from The Song of Achilles but
"Their hands meet, and the light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun."
Final score:
2points
#82
What kind of sigh was that? Peril wondered. Was it an “I wish I were alone with Peril” sigh? Or a “worried about my students” sigh? Knowing Clay, it could also be a “we’re all out of goats and I really wanted one” sigh
- Peril, thinking about Clay in Escaping Peril
Final score:
2points
#83
So it goes.
-Vonnegut.
Final score:
2points
Colin Matthews 3 years ago
Yes. This fits very well with the story he tells. So it goes with Billy pilgrim.
#84
"I feel like I could eat the world raw" - Madeline Miller, in The Song of Achilles
Final score:
1point
#85
"You were the sun and I was crashing into you."
Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell
Final score:
1point
#86
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul... A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
~ Sydney Carton, Tale of Two Cities
Final score:
1point
#87
This is actually from a book that was never made, but the subject of a TV episode. In Death in Paradise, there was a book called "The Flame Tree" written by Lizzie Baptiste. In it is the quote "Perhaps, if I jump, I will be fly. Perhaps, if I jump, I will be free." This was a statement the main character in the book makes as she contemplates throwing herself off a cliff to get away from an abusive man.
Final score:
1point
#88
“What they don’t understand about birthdays and that they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, and ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.
And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday.”
Rachel in Eleven by Sandra Cisneros
Final score:
1point
#89
“Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.” Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears
Final score:
1point
#90
I serve up my heart. You send it back to the kitchen saying "too salty".
- Danielle Woerner 'I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard'
Final score:
1point
#91
From Maison Ikkoku (by Rumiko Takahashi, roughly translated from Korean)
Mr. Otonashi: "Kyoko, in the past, when a man died, his wife's name would be carved in red, together on his grave. 'Widow (未亡人)'. The wife who didn't die yet. But this is wrong. [You] are not the one who didn't die yet, but a person who lives."
Final score:
0points
Daria B (Submission author) 3 years ago
For context, mr. Otonashi is the father of Kyoko's deceased husband, who passed away young, and they're having this conversation at the family's regular annual visit to his grave. It's his way of telling her she has to move on for her own sake.
#92
"You have to be realistic about these things."
- Logen Ninefingers
The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
Final score:
0points
H Moore 3 years ago
“Doing better next time. That’s what life is.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy “But some things have to be done. It’s better to do them, than to live with the fear of them.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law Trilogy “The blade itself incites to deeds of violence’ Homer” “More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law “But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The First Law
#93
"You’re right,” she said. “All my life I have desperately wanted an ugly necklace.”
- Peril to Soar (Escaping Peril)
Final score:
0points
thatmagicgaychick 3 years ago
that whole exchange as I remember it is hilarious. I take back my earlier comment about Jayfeather, I think Peril is my spirit animal
What do you think ?
Devil's Advocate 3 years ago
"The duck bobbed angrily to the surface" is still my favourite, not because it's deep and meaningful like some of these, but because it's so typically Pratchett and makes me smile every time I think about it.
Load More Replies...
PupperPanda 3 years ago
"The theories that drunkenness, laziness or inefficiency are the causes of poverty are so many devices invented and fostered by those who are selfishly interested in maintaining the present states of affairs, for the purpose of preventing us from discovering the real causes of our present condition". The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.
Devil's Advocate 3 years ago
"The duck bobbed angrily to the surface" is still my favourite, not because it's deep and meaningful like some of these, but because it's so typically Pratchett and makes me smile every time I think about it.
Load More Replies... PupperPanda 3 years ago
"The theories that drunkenness, laziness or inefficiency are the causes of poverty are so many devices invented and fostered by those who are selfishly interested in maintaining the present states of affairs, for the purpose of preventing us from discovering the real causes of our present condition". The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.
Related on Bored Panda
