“Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.”
“Everything is in the way the material is composed.”
“They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.”
“They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.”
“That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.”
“Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.”
“It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.”
“How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.”
“Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.”
“It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.”
“...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.”
“Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.”
“We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.”
“Boredom is a bit of a bore, to say the least.”
“There is no such thing as a minor operation. Any opening, incision, cut, gash or puncture in the human body not put there by God is a blasphemy and a major disaster.”
“I am I.” “Tat tvam asi.”
“An example is to say on one hand that this world is imperfect and on the other that everything that happens on the Earth is perfection. How can both be true? Well they are. From the perspective of everyday life, the world is not perfect. We have wars, hunger, disease, unhappiness and pain of all kinds. That’s true. But from the perspective of the evolution of humanity everything is perfect. That’s equally true. The only way we can evolve is by learning from experience and that means experiencing the consequences of our thoughts and actions. If there were no unpleasant consequences for our actions, how could we possibly learn and evolve to higher levels of understanding?”
“The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.”
“In youth, the powers of the mind are directed wholly to the future, and that future assumes such various, vivid, and alluring forms under the influence of hope; hope based, not upon the experience of the past, but upon an assumed possibility of happiness to come, that dreams of expected felicity constitute in themselves the true happiness of that period of our life. Only God Himself knows whether those blessed dreams of youth were ridiculous, or whose the fault was that they never became realized.”
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.