Inspiring book quotes

Regardless of what book I am reading, I always stumble upon a quote that makes me fall into a deep reverie and contemplate over things I would have never thought of before. These quotes give a book its substance and make you meditate on innumerable subjects. Therefore, I’ve decided to share some of my favorite ones with you:

1.”Before I can live with other people I’ve got to live with myself” (To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee-Atticus Finch)

2. “It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”(To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee-Atticus Finch)

3.“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” ( Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley)

4.“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!” ( Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley)

5.“Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.” (Honore de Balzac, Old Goriot)

6.“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince)

7.“The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I’m wandering in countries I can see every detail of–I’m playing a role in the story I’m reading. I actually feel I’m the characters–I live and breathe them.” (Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert)

8. “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”(The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde)

9.“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”(The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde)

10.“The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.” (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens)

11.“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”(Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince)

12.“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonmously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen)

13.“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”(Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen)

14.“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

15.“The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.” (The Red and The Black, Stendhal)

16. “It was the destiny of Napoleon – would it one day be his?” (The Red and The Black, Stendhal)

17. ”So I learned that even after a single day’s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison. He’d have laid up enough memories never to get bored.”(Albert Camus, The Stranger)

18. “If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.” (G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman)

19. “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.(…) We do the world’s will, not our own. “(G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman)

20. “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.” (Henri Bergson, Laughter)