“Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights - the right to swear and curse at your fate!”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“Poetry is the language of the gods. I love poems myself. But poetry is not only in poems; it is diffused everywhere, it is around us. Look at those trees, that sky on all sides there is the breath of beauty, and of life, and where there is life and beauty, there is poetry also.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“Words indeed have been my ruin; they have consumed me, and to the end I cannot be free of them.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well known trick. Simple hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you deny. And that's often an error. In the first place, you can pick holes in anything; and secondly, even if you are right in what you say, it's the worse for you, your intellect, directed by simple negation, grows colorless and withers up. While you gratify your vanity, you are deprived of the true consolations of thought;life--the essence of life--evades your jaundiced and petty criticism, and you end by scolding and becoming ridiculous. Only one who loves has the right to censure and find fault.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: ‘The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.’ Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was ‘an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master.”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“And yet can it be that I was fit for nothing, that for me there was, as it were, no work on earth to do?”
― Ivan Turgenev, quote from Rudin
“The dog is a loyal, lovable animal but Hindu scriptures do not treat it as an auspicious creature perhaps because loyalty feeds on fear and the purpose of Vedic scriptures is to outgrow fear by expanding the mind.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, quote from Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana
“If you are a girl, and you’ve had a significant relationship with someone, chances are you’ve saved all the pictures/letters/supercute little notes from that relationship in a box that is somewhere in your room or apartment or mansion.”
― quote from White Girl Problems
“...capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, quote from What's So Great About Christianity
“I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.”
― Daniel L. Everett, quote from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
“نویسندگان بزرگ یا شوهرند یا معشوق. برخی نویسندگان فضایل استوار یک شوهر را به ما عرضه میکنند: قابل اتکا، فهیم، سخی، برازنده. در سوی دیگر نویسندگانی قرار دارند که در آنها قابلیتهای یک معشوق را ستایش میکنیم، قابلیتهایی که از طبیعت و مزاج برمیآیند تا فضیلت اخلاقی. زنها به شکلی عجیب ویژگیهایی چون بیثباتی، خودخواهی، غیرقابلاتکا بودن، و خشونت را که در مورد شوهر هرگز با آنها کنار نمیآیند در معشوق خود میپذیرند، به شرط آنکه در عوض نوعی هیجان و فوران احساسی شدید را تجربه کنند. به همین سیاق، خوانندگان نیز با فهمناپذیری، وسواسی بودن، حقایق دردناک، دروغ، یا دستور زبان بد کنار میآیند-اگر در عوض نویسنده امکان چشیدن عواطفی کمیاب و احساساتی خطرناک را در اختیارشان قرار دهد. و همانطور که در زندگی وجود شوهر و معشوق هر دو ضروری است، در هنر نیز چنین است. باعث تاسف است که ناگزیر باشیم میان آنها دست به انتخاب بزنیم
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― Susan Sontag, quote from Against Interpretation and Other Essays
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.