Reading does more than inform—it inspires. These famous book quotes from beloved authors will give you a boost when you need it most.
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70 Famous Book Quotes That Are Truly Unforgettable
Famous book quotes that’ll inspire you
Want to learn something new? Crack open a book. Want some inspiration? The best books have that too. The perfect turn of phrase can not only elevate your reading experience but also stick with you long after you’ve finished the last page. Famous book quotes provide everything from wisdom and enlightenment to humor and heart. They’re like that friend who always knows the right thing to say at the right time.
We pulled together the top novel quotes and some of the best lines from nonfiction for you to enjoy, admire and maybe add to your own list of faves. Whether you’re a romance lover, classics buff or reading enthusiast who enjoys a mix of book genres, there’s an inspired book quote—or several—here for you.
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Best book quotes about happiness
1.”Happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it but to delight in it when it comes.” —Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
2.”I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.” —The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
3. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'” —A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
4. “Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.” —Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
5. “There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year.” —Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
6. “I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.” —Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
7. “Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” —Normal People by Sally Rooney
8. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” —Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
9. “Human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.” —Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
10. “Sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities.” —The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Finding happiness can be elusive sometimes, especially when you’re going through a tough time. But grabbing joy in whatever way you can is crucial—and reading feel-good books is a good place to start.
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Empowering book quotes
11. “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” —Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
12.”There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” —I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
13. “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?” —The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
14. “Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.” —The Road to Character by David Brooks
15. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” —Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
16. “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” —All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
17. “Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t.” —The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss
18. “The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed, it would always feel this way.” —Wild by Cheryl Strayed
19. “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” —Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
20. “Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.” —Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
21. “When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example.” —Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
22. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
23. “There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise.” —Rising Strong by Brené Brown
24. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” — The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
25. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” —The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
26. “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.” —The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
27. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” —Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
28. “Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies.” —A Promised Land by Barack Obama
29. “For there is always light, / If only we’re brave enough to see it. / If only we’re brave enough to be it.” —Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
30. “You are your best thing.” —Beloved by Toni Morrison
We all have a personal list of our favorite books, right? And though we may argue about which ones deserve a spot in the Top 10, one thing that we can agree on is that if a book inspires you, motivates you and leaves your heart beating a little faster, then it’s an automatic winner. And if it has one of these famous book quotes? Well, that’s a good sign too.
Popular book quotes about friendship
31.”Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?” —A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
32. “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.” —When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
33. “‘I wonder what Piglet is doing,’ thought Pooh. ‘I wish I were there to be doing it too.'” —Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
34. “Friendship is constant in all other things.” —Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
35. “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” —Beloved by Toni Morrison
36. “Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.” —Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
37. “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” —Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
38. “Well, you can’t make old friends.” —Swing Time by Zadie Smith
39. “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” —Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
40. “A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.” —Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou
41. “They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun.” —The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater
42. “Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.” —Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The best part about chosen family is right there in the name: You get to choose with whom you share your time, energy, love and life. Plus, you can’t beat the feeling of sharing books with friends, discussing your favorite parts and passing famous book quotes back and forth.
Famous book quotes about love
43. “Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” —Jazz by Toni Morrison
44. “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” —The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
45. “We accept the love we think we deserve.” —The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
46. “When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another.” —What I Know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey
47. “I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?” —Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
48. “Beautiful people spend time discovering what their idea of beauty on this earth is. They know themselves well enough to know what they love, and they love themselves enough to fill up with a little of their particular kind of beauty each day.” —Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle
49. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” —Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
50. “There is always something left to love.” —One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
51. “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” —The Princess Bride by William Goldman
52. “Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.” —Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
53. “Loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch.” —Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
54. “He was too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” —Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
55. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” —Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
56. “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” —My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
57. “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” —Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
58. “The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.” —Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
59. “You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” —Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
60. “The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.” —This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
As these well-known quotes from books attest, navigating love and relationships takes patience, kindness and an open heart. Of course, it can be scary and involves work, but the reward is so worth it!
Quotes from books about life and living
61. “When you start to love yourself for the first time, when you start to truly embrace who you are—flaws and all—your scars start to look a lot more like beauty marks.” —Sissy by Jacob Tobia
62. “Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.” —Becoming by Michelle Obama
63. “Home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family.” —An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
64. “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.” —Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
65. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
66. “We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. ” —Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
67. “A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.” —Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
68. It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” —The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
69. “Time moves slowly but passes quickly.” —The Color Purple by Alice Walker
70. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” —Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Short and sweet or more nuanced and layered, each of these famous book quotes offers wise words about how to live this life to your best abilities.
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