108 Classic Book Quotes

Following is our list of classic book quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about classic.

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Famous Classic Book Quotes

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. — Mark Twain

The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork. — William F. Nolan

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. - Italo Calvino

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. — Italo Calvino

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. — John Milton

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. — Robertson Davies

Books worth reading are worth re-reading. — Holbrook Jackson

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. — J. Swartz

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. — William Styron

There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital. — Al Capp

There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. — Joseph Addison

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. — Herman Melville

A book is the only immortality. — Rufus Choate

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly. — Francis Bacon

Short Classic Book Quotes

  • Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly. — Cornelia Funke
  • Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable. — Louisa May Alcott
  • The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. — James McCosh
  • A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. — Indian Proverbs
  • Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. — Henry David Thoreau
  • Only one book is worth reading: the heart. — Ajahn Chah
  • Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen. — Joineriana
  • All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Classic book quote There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your ow
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.

Old Classic Quotes

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. - Victor Hugo

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. — Victor Hugo

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that? — Bob Hope

I forever felt that I've fallen right between the crack of way too young for the first generation of classic rock 'n' roll and too old to be brand-new. It's hard. — Paul Westerberg

Classic book quote There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you re
There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you realize there is so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.

I am a classical music lover - not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff. — Eberhard Weber

I see friends who are in different genres of music, and they say they're so burnt playing the same stuff every night. That's why you see a country act wanting to go out and play an old classic rock song. But what cracks me up is that they all want to be Jimmy Buffett. I can't figure that out. — Kid Rock

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends. — Sylvia Plath

Classic book quote Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death.
Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death.

For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar. — Marc Almond

When I'm 40, too old to be a rock star, I plan to go back to college to study classical music. — Chris Martin

My Dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 when I was 4 years old. He left a lot of classical recordings behind that I began listening to at an early age, so he must have been a music lover. — Tom Glazer

Now, I know you expected me to say that, well, I just kick back in the rocking chair, fished a little bit, listened to Willie Nelson tapes and watched old baseball games on the Classic Sports network. And, tell you the truth, I have done that for maybe about five total minutes. — Dan Rather

Classic Quotes

Quiet people have the loudest minds. - Stephen Hawking

Quiet people have the loudest minds. — Stephen Hawking

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right. — Clive James

You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice. — Vladimir Lenin

Classic book quote The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. — Clark Gable

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. — Chris Hedges

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. — Sylvia Plath

I like to wear classic silhouettes and add a punch to it. - Serena Williams

I like to wear classic silhouettes and add a punch to it. — Serena Williams

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end. — Sylvia Plath

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch? — Lara St. John

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray

Classic Love Quotes

I want every fan of Rand to hear [Polaha] say the classic Galt phrase: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. — John Galt

Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me... aren't you? — Dustin Hoffman

When I was your age — about, ooh, a thousand years ago — I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, eh? All the classics. — Mark Gatiss

Classic book quote You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Adam Levine and I remade the Rolling Stones' classic Wild Horses, and it is right up my alley, that whole style. It has a style of its own but still stays very true to the classic arrangement, and I love it. — Alicia Keys

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. — Emily Bronte

Classic book quote I went away in my head, into a book.
I went away in my head, into a book.

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera. — Cecilia Bartoli

To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To you, respect. — Oren Arnold

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I love classic rock, rock and roll, that's the top notch. I love soul - bluesy music as well. — Haley Reinhart

Classic Movie Quotes

I wish I knew how to quit you. — Annie Proulx

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. — Mario Puzo

All Quiet on the Western Front. — Erich Maria Remarque

Classic book quote WIth freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy.
WIth freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy.

I don't have any illusion that The Creeper is as popular or will ever be as popular as any of the classic movie monsters, but I think in the heart of every young horror fan is his desire to create his own creature. — Victor Salva

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. — Michael Douglas

I've found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don't ever intend to be without it again. I'll never be hungry again. — Margaret Mitchell

Classic book quote A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.
A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.

The Goonies' is classic. That's, like, the movie I bring with me if I go out of town for a long time, because it just makes me think of the best times I've seen it with my friends growing up. Dude, everybody knows that movie, everybody watches that film. Best family film ever made. — Logan Lerman

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake. — Tim Burton

I know what you're thinking 'Did he fire six shots or only five? — Clint Eastwood

Great movie stars like Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor who were capable of saying so much without saying anything at all merely by carrying themselves in a classic fashion that's timeless yet relatable. — Lily Collins

People Writing About Classic Book

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Mark Twain

Mark Twain
quotes on life, travel and love

2433 47813
Read quotes by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino
quotes on love

134 717
Read quotes by John Milton

John Milton
quotes on love, death and freedom of speech

780 4024
Read quotes by Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies
quotes on education, love

230 1138
Read quotes by Holbrook Jackson

Holbrook Jackson
quotes on life, education and leadership

46 189
Read quotes by William Styron

William Styron

59 308

More Classic Book Quotes

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited. — Sylvia Plath

If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media. — Rick Rubin

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. — Judith Viorst

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. — Clifton Fadiman

An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance. — T. E. Lawrence

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. — Carl Van Doren

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less. — David Nicholls

To boldly go where no one has gone before — Stephen Hawking

I couldn't read. I just scraped by. My solution back then was to read classic comic books because I could figure them out from the context of the pictures. Now I listen to books on tape. — Charles R. Schwab

A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is. — Mario Batali

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans. — Italo Calvino

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence. — James Surowiecki

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation. — Lawrence Clark Powell

Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read. — Mark Twain

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all. — Anthony Lane

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. — Mark Twain

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. — Alan Bennett

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive. — Alfred Kazin

To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament. — John Warwick Montgomery

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. — Carl Jung

No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles lettres of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet? — Bernard Ramm

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird. — John Krasinski

It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while. — Seth Grahame-Smith

The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight. — Ann Widdecombe

This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods. — Elizabeth Taylor

Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father's side, those classic and Western books. — Cai Guo-Qiang

Some days are like that. Even in Australia. — Judith Viorst

My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems. — Lawrence Joseph

I don't spend much on clothes. I buy old books. I tell myself I ought to save - it's the classic Northern work ethic. I like good holidays, though. I'm a big fan of cruises. I love unpacking once and having the scenery change every day. — Alan Titchmarsh

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time. — William Landay

A cult classic... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations. — Jim Jarmusch

Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before. — Clifton Paul Fadiman

Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best. — Robertson Davies

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets. — Anita Diament

I suppose I've been interested in Abraham Lincoln for almost as long as I can remember. My first Lincoln book was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the life of Lincoln, and with that, I was hooked. — Allen C. Guelzo

Russian culture is multifaceted and diverse. So if you want to understand, to feel Russia, then of course you need to read books, Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gogol and others. Listen to music. Tchaikovsky. Watch our classical ballet. But the most important thing is that you need to talk with people. — Vladimir Putin

I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic. — Frances Clarke Sayers

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome. — Liv Ullmann

I was about 21 when I read that [Mere Christianity], and my faith was really being shaken during those days. Its a great, classic book. — Max Lucado

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