Books That Inspire Quotes & Sayings

The greatest thing about writing is that you get to shape more than one life. — Katja Michael

I see. And who is this author?"
"Neil Fucking Gaiman."
"His second name is Fucking?"
"No, Leif, that's the honorary second name all celebrities are given by their fans. It's not an insult, it's a huge compliment, and he's earned it. You'd like him. He dresses all in black like you. Read a couple of his books, and then when you meet him, you'll squee too."
Leif found the suggestion distasteful. "I would never behave with so little dignity. Nor would I wish to be confronted in such a manner by anyone else. Vampires inspire screams, not squees. Involuntary urination is common, I grant, but it properly flows from a sense of terror, not an ecstatic sense of hero worship. — Kevin Hearne

Each Inspirational Messenger who was and has been acknowledged in the history books was done so because of the way they chose to live. Their life had a core message that was central to their years, whether they exemplified and expressed whenever they took a step in the world. — Emily Gowor

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? — Nick Hornby

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire. — Sara Sheridan

Small children like to mimic their parents. Give them something good to mimic read a book.

Children learn what they live.


Morals are taught by parents from a young age. They are not learned from text books.

Buying a book for a child is a small price. A smile on a child's face is priceless.


Communication with children give better odds in knowing what they want.

Using imagination can inspire us all. Why not allow children to explore their imagination?

A happy child is a child reading a good book. — Cindy Roman

The films in 101 Movies to See Before You Grow Up are meant to be watched with your family. I hope that if I inspire you to do this even once a week, you will have spent an unforgettable hour or two taking a journey together into the limitless boundaries of imagination and creativity that only movies can take us on from the comfort of your own home. — Suzette Valle

That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve. — Johnny Ball

There's something deep in the heart of every person that wants
to protect culture. The only thing about my pending career that
was changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,
not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarians
were only as important as the community they inspired. If I
was going to continue with this career, my job wouldn't be to protect
information, it would be to bring the community together and
inspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for. — Scott Douglas

Books can move people, inspire people, change people's lives, and even impact whole societies. They are certainly worth spending an afternoon with. — Jan Surasky

I am honored to have the opportunity to inspire the young and the young at heart through our Picture Books and author talks. — Julie Freyermuth

Books inspire us to dream, and then if we let them they will help us to achieve that dream! — Carmela Dutra

I've always felt like my calling was to inspire people. And not with famed, epic accomplishments, but with imperfection, struggles and humanity. I want people to read my stories and books and blogs, and look at my life and say, She should have had nothing going for her. Meager means, questionable looks, no apparent safety nets and an absence of impressive letters after her name. But she followed her bliss anyway. If she can do it, I can do it. I'm not giving up. — Jennifer DeLucy

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. — Carl Sagan

Think of yourself as being a car and passion is the fuel. The more you have the further you'll go-and without it you go nowhere! The gas stations are books, workshops, seminars, influential people and anything else that can inspire you to take action. Keep filling yourself up and you will keep moving towards your goal. Now on the other hand the fuel drainers are things like: negative people, bad diets, unfulfilling working conditions, garbage movies/music and basically anything that doesn't produce value for your life. You want to stay far away from these drainers especially if you are PurposeSearching. Chapter — Rob Howze

Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it. (177) — Thomas Lewis

Nothing can compare to the feeling evoked by turning the page in a great book. — Aneta Cruz

My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad. — Jeanne Darst

If a book doesn't inspire you to read more, it was not worth read. — Aman Jassal

I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good. — Don Novello

Author Brene Brown - her books inspire me to "dare greatly". — Megan Alexander

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go. — Paul Theroux

Books educate and inspire, and they soothe souls
like comfort food without the calories. — Elizabeth Berg

What will become of us in twenty years' time?" we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: "Anarchist gangster" (so the newspapers). I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and a trade-union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a Press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. — Victor Serge

can listen and counsel. You can lend ideas and hard work and home-cooked meals. You can be a friend and a fan. You can share your favorite books and fix a flat tire. You can inspire people and encourage them. You can sweat beside them and support them. But you cannot make their choices for them. You cannot take their excuses from them. You cannot make them resilient. — Eric Greitens

Preserve, Conserve, Inspire, Teach. Empowering children to be planet-citizens; to care about the planet, themselves and eachtother! Breath-of-fresh-air books that speak to the heart of children - is what matters to me."
- Stephanie Tara, author, mom, activist — Stephanie Lisa Tara

I don't need the water to be inspired. My stories inspire me, not the location of where I'm parked. And good thing, since I've had to finish books in airports, in the RV we used to have, the lake house, while on vacation, at home, in the kitchen when my office PC was on the fritz. — Lori Foster

I really just love to read, period, whether it be books or magazines or the back of the cereal box. It's the one thing I can always count on to calm me down, take me away and inspire me, all at once. — Sarah Dessen

The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. — Richard Dawkins

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me. — Betsy Byars

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on ... — Matthew Pearl

Well, yes, there were quite a lot of books throughout, tumbling out of haphazardly placed bookshelves, stacked beneath chairs, beside beds, even in the bottoms of a closet or two. But I was never a "collector." My love of books is a love of what they contain; they hold knowledge as a pitcher holds water, as a dress contains the mystery of a woman's exquisite body. Their physicality matters
do not speak to me of storing books as bytes!
but they should not inspire fetishistic devotion. — Julia Glass

It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better. — Sebastien De Castell

Books never pall on me. They discourse with us, they take counsel with us, and are united to us by a certain living chatty familiarity. And not only does each book inspire the sense that it belongs to its readers, but it also suggests the name of others, and one begets the desire of the other. — Petrarch

The most reward experience is having another writer come up to you and say that they started writing because they read my books. That is how writing as a profession continues: readers becomes writers who inspire new readers. — Michael Scott

I want to inspire through example. I hope my books motivate others to open doors and windows that will help them to embrace their own truth, light and joy. — Alexandra Stoddard

Books are for nothing but to inspire — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. — Henry David Thoreau

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War. — Stephen Jay Gould

Books inspire me to create a better reality. — Daniel Vlcek

Books and movies inspire me, but I do my best to keep my stories as original as possible. — Nicholas Sparks

Want to inspire your kids to read more? Try giving them kids some money to spend just on a book. Take them to a bookstore and let them browse and pick out one book that they will love. Or try going to a local library for a few hours and just let your kids sift through books that interest them. — Melanie Kirk

My best ideas come to me at unexpected moments, like when I'm reading children's books to my kids (the pictures inspire me), shopping, driving somewhere, seeing different things. — Mary Engelbreit

The most popular TED speakers give presentations that stand out in a sea of ideas. As Daniel Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, "Like it or not, we're all in sales now."4 If you've been invited to give a TED talk, this book is your bible. If you haven't been invited to give a TED talk and have no intention of doing so, this book is still among the most valuable books you'll ever read because it will teach you how to sell yourself and your ideas more persuasively than you've ever imagined. It will teach you how to incorporate the elements that all inspiring presentations share, and it will show you how to reimagine the way you see yourself as a leader and a communicator. Remember, if you can't inspire anyone else with your ideas, it won't matter how great those ideas are. Ideas are only as good as the actions that follow the communication of those ideas. — Carmine Gallo

Books can inspire you to love yourself more, but by listening to, writing out, or verbally expressing your feelings you are actually doing it. — John N. Gray

Yet Katie held fast to the dream that perhaps there were men in the world who appreciated good women - men capable of loving a woman enough to die for her.
Something had to inspire the heroes in fairy tales and books.
Her Aunt Augusta always said it was only womenfolk's eternal wish for better men that inspired such stories ... but Katie liked to believe that living or, at least, once-living men inspired them. — Marcia Lynn McClure

Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry. — Kellie Elmore

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst ... They are for nothing but to inspire. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

These 'mistakes' occur in my books for a reason. I have an agenda: I'm secretly trying to inspire kids to create their own stories and comics, and I don't want them to feel stifled by 'perfectionism.' — Dav Pilkey

Osho's books inspire me to meditate. They give me peace of mind. — Kapil Dev

It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me. — Fay Godwin

For Heaven's sake, Cousin, resumed Arabella, laughing, how have you spent your Time; and to what Studies have you devoted all your Hours, that you could find none to spare for the Perusal of Books from which all useful Knowlege may be drawn; which give us the most shining Examples of Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love; which regulate our Actions, form our Manners, and inspire us with a noble Desire of emulating those great, heroic, and virtuous Actions, which made those Persons so glorious in their Age, and so worthy Imitation in ours? — Charlotte Lennox

God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books. — Khalil Gibran

So grateful for your continued belief in my books. I'd like to thank, most importantly, the fans who have made my career possible, who inspire and galvanize me to write more and better. — Lauren Oliver

Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I've always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn't know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those "many thousand" selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It's you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I've been waiting to tell everything to. — Suzanne Berne