Voltaire

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Never judge a book by its movie.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

I love books.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.