“...you can't let something that'll probably never happen ruin your life. You're only helping to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“...maybe we don't need a heavenly bribe or the fear of hell and damnation to make us behave decently. Maybe it would be healthier if people started believing in themselves instead.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“We're still dancing to tunes created by men who thought that a thunderstorm was a sig of God's anger.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Here we are, two thousand years later, with everything we’ve accomplished, everything we know, and yet this little talisman still rules the way billions of people live…and die.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Làm cái ghề như tôi thì khó có vợ lắm"
"Chà, hẳn rồi, nếu cái nghề đó cho phép anh nhảy lên máy bay với các cô gái chỉ mới quen biết. Tôi cũng hẳn chẳng muốn chồng mình làm điều đó hằng ngày”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Bế quan tỏa cảng với thế giới còn lại”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Ai trong chúng ta thực sự biết điều gì sẽ xảy ra với mình? Anh chỉ cần sống cuộc sống của mình và hi vọng vào những điều tốt đẹp nhất”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“What did it matter if it was based on a story that embellished the truth?”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“...beneath it all, religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning. And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we've become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“At the time, any science, as it was then called, was thought to be a challenge to the authority of the Church; a science that promised spiritual purification was a direct threat to the Church.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Over a billion people out there, worshipping these writings, accepting every word as God’s own wisdom, slaughtering each other over them, and all of it without having the vaguest notion of where these scriptures really come from.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we’ve become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“most expeditions lacked something Vance had at his disposal: the astrolabe,”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“I've rarely said the word "Lord," unless it's followed by "of the Rings.”
― A.J. Jacobs, quote from The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
“Is there anything you can't do, Mr. Cruse?" she said.
"I can't sing," I said.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Airborn
“Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects.
...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.”
― Stephen Fry, quote from Moab Is My Washpot
“I brought you here because for the first time in almost a hundred years I was able to see something, and that something was you Arianna.”
― Erica Stevens, quote from Captured
“It is true. Indeed, that is why I dared not speak. I have yearned to be again at the side of my beloved Arianllyn, and my thoughts are with her now. But had I chosen to return, I would ever wonder whether my choice was made through wisdom or following the wishes of my own heart. I see this is as it must be, and the destiny laid upon me. I am content to die here.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Black Cauldron
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.