Meaningful Quotes and Passages from Books

Post Reply New Topic

"Would you like an adventure now, or shall we have our tea first?"

“I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us."

— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

[H]ow oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.

[…]

I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

— Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

— Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

"In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them"

Jules Verne - Five weeks in a balloon

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one”

“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 see it through no matter what.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

"We make only a small blaze, and then we go out; but in his springtime and his summer he had burned brightly enough, and he did not feel he had earned this sullen, joyless autumn."

Robert Silverberg, The Man in the Maze

“Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty.”

― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

I recommend book: when I'm old I'm going to wear purple!! !

Reminds me of being a child and watching the old lady at hairdresser have short hair dyed purple, then two hours to curl the hair.
I'm not woke, I'm just not in touch with reality, anymore.

^ I think you mean this poem -

^ Thanks for posting it!


Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”



I love Oscar Wilde.



“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

"Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested."

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

I am neither for nor against apathy - Unknown

Carl Sagan’s books have been especially meaningful to me. This passage is from Pale Blue Dot:

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

— George Orwell, 1984

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”

— Plato’s allegory of the cave from The Republic

“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

Sonnet 116 has been on my mind a lot lately. The first few lines come into my head whenever I’m out for a walk. It probably means that it’s almost time to return to Shakespeare and that I’m a romantic but don’t tell anyone.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.