Quotes by Authors - Page 291

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.
Maryrose Wood
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.
Austin Kleon
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!
Ray Bradbury
There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books.
Maggie Stiefvater
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
Margaret Drabble
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
Neil Gaiman
Olly: jesus. is there a girl on this planet who doesn't love mr.darcyMadeline: All girls love Mr. Darcy?Olly: are you kidding? even my sister loves darcy and she doesn't love anybodyMadeline: She must love somebody. I'm sure she loves youOlly: what's so great about darcy?Madeline: That's not a serious questionOlly: he's a snobMadeline: But he overcomes it and eventually realizes that character matters more than class! He's a man open to learning life's lessons! Also, he's completely gorgeous and noble and brooding and poetic. Did I mention gorgeous? Also, he loves Elizabeth beyond all reason.
Nicola Yoon
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.
W.H. Auden
In your hands winteris a book with cloud pagesthat snow pearls of love.
Aberjhani
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
Anonymous
I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.
Roman Payne
Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.
Kelly Link
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
Geraldine Brooks
CUSTOMER: If I were to, say... meet the love of my life in this bookshop, what section do you think they would be standing in?
Jen Campbell
I truly believe that if you have more friends than books, you have too many friends. Or not enough books. Probably both.
Zoë Marriott
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.
Maggie Stiefvater
Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured.
Christine de Pizan
When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read—with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature.
Andrew Clements
We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.
Kevin Smokler
The library is like a candy store where everything is free.
Jamie Ford
No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.
Bohumil Hrabal
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
Douglas Adams
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1.tHomer – Iliad, Odyssey2.tThe Old Testament3.tAeschylus – Tragedies4.tSophocles – Tragedies5.tHerodotus – Histories6.tEuripides – Tragedies7.tThucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War8.tHippocrates – Medical Writings9.tAristophanes – Comedies10.tPlato – Dialogues11.tAristotle – Works12.tEpicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13.tEuclid – Elements14.tArchimedes – Works15.tApollonius of Perga – Conic Sections16.tCicero – Works17.tLucretius – On the Nature of Things18.tVirgil – Works19.tHorace – Works20.tLivy – History of Rome21.tOvid – Works22.tPlutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia23.tTacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24.tNicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic25.tEpictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion26.tPtolemy – Almagest27.tLucian – Works28.tMarcus Aurelius – Meditations29.tGalen – On the Natural Faculties30.tThe New Testament31.tPlotinus – The Enneads32.tSt. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33.tThe Song of Roland34.tThe Nibelungenlied35.tThe Saga of Burnt Njál36.tSt. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica37.tDante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38.tGeoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39.tLeonardo da Vinci – Notebooks40.tNiccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41.tDesiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly42.tNicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43.tThomas More – Utopia44.tMartin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises45.tFrançois Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel46.tJohn Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion47.tMichel de Montaigne – Essays48.tWilliam Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49.tMiguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote50.tEdmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51.tFrancis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52.tWilliam Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays53.tGalileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54.tJohannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55.tWilliam Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56.tThomas Hobbes – Leviathan57.tRené Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58.tJohn Milton – Works59.tMolière – Comedies60.tBlaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61.tChristiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light62.tBenedict de Spinoza – Ethics63.tJohn Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64.tJean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies65.tIsaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66.tGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67.tDaniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe68.tJonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69.tWilliam Congreve – The Way of the World70.tGeorge Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge71.tAlexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72.tCharles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73.tVoltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74.tHenry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75.tSamuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
Mortimer J. Adler
I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the
Philip Pullman
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte
Philip Pullman
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.
Neil Gaiman
We live for books.
Umberto Eco
Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, science is just a one instant like a baby trying to talk.
Muditha Champika
[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.
Robert Epstein
But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?
Carl Sagan
There is no secret in attaining God. In the path of Enlightenment, any theoretical mystery-mongering preacher that weakens the mind, should be rejected at once. Science has no secrets. The very purpose of it is to unravel the secrets of Nature and the Universe. That is why it is so beautiful. And so should be the path of Enlightenment.
Abhijit Naskar
... Protestantism, in its quest for 'rational knowledge' of God's purpose and for an understanding of this world, engendered its own demise, for it lent legitimacy to a secular science that in turn rejected and devalued all religious values. And in this respect, Protestantism effectively devalued or disenchanted itself, for in its attempt to prove its own intrinsic rationality through non-religious means it affirmed the value of science, and with this laid itself open to the charge of irrationalism and to attack from the outside from 'rational', secular forms of this-worldly legitimation.
Nicholas Gane
Sonya, as a scientist, it's never just about the logistics of life. One must always be optimistic, or else you'll never discover or learn anything new. Though of course, you might also find that such a mentality should never be restricted to such an occupation as mine.
Lauren Lola
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.
Abhijit Naskar
I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another.
Abhijit Naskar
At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.
David Eddings
Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
The highest heaven is not in the sky, it is in the human mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Psychics, astrology, tarot cards - all these mystical non-sense are signs of a weak mind. Whenever such garbage starts grabbing hold of you, seek the help of a physician or therapist.
Abhijit Naskar
Be naive and curious. That's all you need to become a scientist.
Abhijit Naskar
All knowledge that Science has acquired so far, has been through the concentration of the powers of the mind.
Abhijit Naskar
[Concerning Lyotard's ideology:]... Theory ought to be recognized as part of the problem, not as a potential solution.
Bill Readings
Every true scientist is a philosopher, but not every philosopher is a scientist.
Abhijit Naskar
When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.
Abhijit Naskar
Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.
Hope Jahren
In the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date.
Abhijit Naskar
. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often.
Malcolm Gladwell
In Science don't confound Normal static electricity To ecstatic eccentricity. Here is what I found: Electric charges As they rise up your hair In contrast with a discharge, Rarity leaves you up in the air!
Ana Claudia Antunes
The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts.
Frans de Waal
The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.
Abhijit Naskar
The sacred texts of human history from all over the world, can never be perceived by the rational mind as texts of historical accuracy. They can only be a glaring representation of the traditions and ideals of the people. Now, it is up to the rational mind, to analyze those texts and thereafter consume the good elements from them, while discarding the rest.
Abhijit Naskar
What is salvation for humans? The answer is simple: Salvation is to perpetuate our existence via science!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.
Ernest Cline
It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).
Abhijit Naskar