“Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else—Satan has us just where he wants us.”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“Who can be 'agents unto themselves' if they are in bondage to others and have to accept their terms?”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“Can the mere convenience that makes money such a useful device continue indefinitely to outweigh the horrendous and growing burden of evil that it imposes on the human race and ultimately brings its dependents to ruin?”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty.”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“Self-justification, that was the danger-- the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all.”
― Hugh Nibley, quote from Approaching Zion
“It is strange how interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings.”
― Bruno Schulz, quote from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
“I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Why couldn’t morality have evolved to promote cooperation in a more general way? Because universal cooperation is inconsistent with the principles governing evolution by natural selection. I”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
“we need to separate the real rewards that give our lives meaning from the false rewards that keep us distracted and addicted. Learning to make this distinction may be the best we can do.”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
“When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream.
A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy.
I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.