Book quotes are probably those little gems of wisdom we all feel drawn to. We jot them down in our notebooks from a young age and then keep liking, sharing, and nodding at the ones we see around the web.
Some books will forever leave us thinking and overthinking our vision of life and love. And the book quotes you will see below are these types of sayings.
You will go through them and probably choose the one you need, but another few will also leave their trail in your mind and heart.
Because books and quotes are those endless sources of inspiration that challenge us to be our best selves.
So, I hope you enjoy our suggestions below and keep in mind that if a quote from a book impresses you, maybe you should read the book as well.
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Famous Book Quotes
- “I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.” – Margaret Atwood
2. “Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded, he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
“After all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7))
3. “I might be in love with you.” He smiles a little. “I’m waiting until I’m sure to tell you, though.” – Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
4. “Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.” – Shawn Slovo (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin)
5. “Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”
Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)
6. “I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.” – Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
7. “And what would humans be without love?” RARE, said Death.” – Terry Pratchett (Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind #3))
8. “Do what you love, love what you do, and with all your heart give yourself to it.”— Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
9. “Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.”— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
Heartfelt Quotes From Books
10. “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”– Oscar Wilde
11. “All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world: “And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.” She tried to smile once more and expired.” – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
12. “Traveling is the great true love of my life…I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel the way about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby – I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me.” — Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love)
13. “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
14. “When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
15. “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
16. “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” — Ernest Hemingway (Men Without Women) – Listen for free with Audible
17. “The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.” — Rumi (The Illuminated Rumi)
18. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
19. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope…I have loved none but you.”— Jane Austen (Persuasion)
20. “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self-respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her, and it is the beginning of everything.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Timeless Quotes On Love and Life
21. “Who, being loved, is poor?” – Oscar Wilde
22. “Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me;
For I shall already have forgotten you.”
Pablo Neruda (Selected Poems)
23. “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”— Federico García Lorca (Blood Wedding and Yerma )
24. “It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”— E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
25. “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”— C.S. Lewis
26. “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” — Mary Oliver
27. “Tonight, I can write the saddest lines, I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.” – Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)
28. “Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.” — Paulo Coelho
29. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
30. “Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!” — Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
Self-Love and Love…
31. “Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
William Shakespeare
32. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” — Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)
33. “Do not fall in love with people like me.
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave, you will finally understand why storms are named after people.”
Caitlyn Siehl (Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems (Volume 1))
34. “Let our scars fall in love.” — Galway Kinnell
35. “And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn’t matter.” — Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
36. “Tell me.” I loved it when he was like this.
“I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to his. “Swear it.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the reason. Swear it.”
“I swear it,” I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
“I swear it,” he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
37. “Come sleep with me: We won’t make Love, Love will make us.”— Julio Cortázar
38. “Though my soul may set in darkness; it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”— Sarah Williams (Twilight Hours: A Legacy Of Verse)
39. “What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.” — Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1))
40. “In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”
Jack Kornfield (Buddha’s Little Instruction Book)
Best Book Quotes To Have at Hand
41. “You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.”-Arthur Conan Doyle
42. “Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.”— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)
43. “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
44. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” — Leo Tolstoy
45. “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”— François de La Rochefoucauld (Maxims)
46. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being, and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”— Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
47. “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”— Zora Neale Hurston
48. “I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.”— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
49. “This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there’s no need at all to understand what’s happening, because everything happens within you.”— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) – Listen for free with Audible
50. “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!”— André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
51. “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.” -Jane Austen
52. “I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”— Lemony Snicket
53. “Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.”– Paulo Coelho
Long Quotes From Books on Feelings
54. “You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over, and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”— Richard Siken
55. “What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”— George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
56. “Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you, and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
57. “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them… I destroy them.”— Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game (Ender’s Saga, #1))
58. “I love mankind, he said, “but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love men in particular.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
59. “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) – Watch the classic movie here
There is Never Time or Place for Love…
60. “There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.” ― Sarah Dessen
61. “Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.”— E.E. Cummings
62. “. . . when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.”— Rebecca Walker (Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence)
63. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”— Jane Austen (Emma)
64. “We are who we are, because of those we choose to love and because of those who love us.”— Kate Mosse (The Winter Ghosts)
65. “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.
So if you love a flower, let it be.
Love is not about possession.
Love is about appreciation.”
Osho
66. “…to live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go”— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems, Volume One)
67. “So it’s true when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”— E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1))
68. “Finding someone you love and who loves you back is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. But finding a true soul mate is an even better feeling. A soul mate is someone who understands you like no other, loves you like no other, will be there for you forever, no matter what. They say that nothing lasts forever, but I am a firm believer in the fact that for some, love lives on even after we’re gone.”— Cecelia Ahern (P.S. I Love You (P.S. I Love You, #1)) Watch the movie for free with Prime Video
69. “Maybe that’s what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.”— Tom Perrotta (Election)
70. “I know that’s what people say– you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love, it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
71. “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”― Charles Bukowski
72. “He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”— Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
There Is Always Something Left To Love…
73. “You deserve someone who loves you with every single beat of his heart, someone who thinks about you constantly, someone who spends every minute of every day just wondering what you’re doing, where you are, who you’re with, and if you’re OK. You need someone who can help you reach your dreams and protect you from your fears. You need someone who will treat you with respect, love every part of you, especially your flaws. You should be with someone who could make you happy, really happy, dancing on air happy.”— Cecelia Ahern (Love, Rosie)
74. “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”— Mother Teresa
75. “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
76. “Do what you love, love what you do, and with all your heart give yourself to it.”— Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
77. “Love isn’t an act, it’s a whole life.”— Brian Moore
78. “There is always something left to love.”— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
79. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”— Charles Bukowski (What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire)
80. “When I fall in love, it will be forever.”— Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay)
81. “I would die for you. But I won’t live for you.” ― Stephen Chbosky
82. “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” ― Zelda Fitzgerald
83. “and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn’t live for very long without a heart.”— Jodi Picoult
Life and Love – Best Book Quotes
84. “Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don’t know. She probably didn’t even know I was there. But I’ll always love her. All my life.”— Neil Gaiman (Worlds’ End (The Sandman, #8))
85. “When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …”— Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
86. “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”— Sharon Salzberg
87. “People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”— Charles Bukowski (Women)
88. “There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”— Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
89. “I belong to my beloved, and my beloved is mine.”
90. “I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I remember everything.’
I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”— André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
To Love and Be Loved
91. “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.” ― Nicole Krauss
92. “Every heart sings a song, incomplete until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” ― Plato
93. “I like not only to be loved but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”— George Eliot
94. “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”— George MacDonald
95. “And that’s just it, isn’t it? That’s how we manage to survive the loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away; it never fades, so long as you hang on to it.”— Gayle Forman (If I Stay)
96. “Love, it never dies. It never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it. Love can make you immortal”— Gayle Forman (If I Stay)
97. “True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.”— Erich Segal
98. “We loved with a love that was more than love.” ― Edgar Allen Poe
99. “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”― Friedrich Nietzsche
100. “Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.” ― Paulo Coelho
Blogger, dreamer, procrastinator, and lover of everything soul-touching. My mission is to make you laugh, provoke your thoughts, light up your day and inspire you to fall in love with life and yourself.
