"Pride and Prejudice Quotes by Jane Austen

Here are selected quotes from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, one of the best classic books of all-time.

- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

- "Affectation of candour is common enough— one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design— to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad— belongs to you alone."

- "Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

- ""Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

- "A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment."

"Cat's Cradle" Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Here are selected quotes from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, one of the best classic books of all-time.

- "All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

- "Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you." - Dr. Hoenikker's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

- "There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look."

- "She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

- "Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."

- "New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."

- "As Bokonon says: 'Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.'"

"SlaughterHouse-Five" Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Here are selected quotes from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, one of the best classic books of all-time.

- The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

- "At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still."

- "The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."

Best Classic Books List

Here is a list of the best classic books that I have read, along with a favorite quote from the book!

01. Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

02. JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

03. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
"So it goes."

04. Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

05. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
"What do you think?" shouted Razumikhin, louder than ever, "you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped."

06. William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
"A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune."

07. Ernest Hemingway - Farewell To Arms
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

08. George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."

09. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."

10. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
"He who marches out of line hears another drum."

11. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different it's course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for the moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

12. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
"He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain."

13. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

14. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat."

15. Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."

16. John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
"Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody."

17. Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist
"'Please, sir, I want some more.'"

18. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
"We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures."

19. Lewis Carroll - Through The Looking-Glass
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

20. CS Lewis - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
"If the witch understood the true meaning of sacrifice, she might have interpreted the Deep Magic differently, for when a willing victim who has committed no treachery, dies in a traitor’s stead, the stone table will crack and even death itself will turn backwards."

21. Jack London - The Call of the Wild
"For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work."

22. George Orwell - Animal Farm
"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS."

23. Homer - The Odyssey
"How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!"

24. William Golding - Lord of the Flies
"His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink."


25. Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
"Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-from high flat temples-in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blonde Satan."

26. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!""

27. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.


What other classics should I be sure to read?

"The Tale of Despereaux" Quotes by Kate DiCamillo

Here are selected quotes from The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.

- "Reader, do you believe that there is such a thing as happily ever after? Or, like Despereaux, have you, too, begun to question the possibility of happy endings?" (58)

- "Reader, this is important: The rat called Chiaroscuro did not look away. He let the light from the upstairs world enter him and fill him. He gasped aloud with the wonder of it." (93)

- “There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.”

- “Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.”

- “There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.”

- “This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.”

- “Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”

"Come Be My Light" Quotes by Mother Teresa

Here are selected quotes from Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa.

- "Now I really rejoice when something does not go as I wish - because I see that He wants our trust - that is why in the loss let us praise God as if we have got everything." (24)

- "In the silence of the heart God speaks." (32)

- "God loves a cheerful giver. The best way to show your gratitude to God and people is to accept everything with joy. A joyful heart is the normal result of a heart burning with love. Joy is strength." (33)

- "How much is the love He has for you - beyond all that you can imagine... Not only He loves you, even more - He longs for you. He missed you when you don't come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don't feel worthy." (42)

- "So smile - smile at the hand that strikes you - kiss the hand that is nailing you to the cross." (157)

- "Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, but in the fervor of the desire which raises the heart in Jesus." (4)

- "We do not need to carry out grand things in order to show a great love for God and our neighbor. It is in the intensity of love we put into our gestures that makes them something beautiful for God." (26)

- "If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust your own powers. Never bother about people's opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed. The Lord has willed me where I am. He will offer a solution." (30-31)

- "If you are really in love with Christ, no matter how small your work, it will be done better; it will be wholehearted. Your work will prove your love." (69)

- "The fruit of love is service." (72)

- "Faith in action is service." (72)

- "Suffering, pain, sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that He can kiss you." (137)

"On The Rez" Quotes by Ian Frazier

Here are selected quotes from On the Rez by Ian Frazier.

- "Any smugness at the thought of this urge to division in Indian society ignores how powerful it has been in the United States at large. From a certain perspective, the history of the United States has been a history of schism. Whether we would be one nation or many has perplexed us from the start... We know, for example, that the United States has been a Protestant-majority nation since it began. That fact seems simple, white-bread, monochrome. But the origin of the Protestants in America was protest and argument. Especially in the early nineteenth century the Protestants in America argued and disagreed and divided into factions so prolifically as to make the Indian tribes seem unanimous by comparison. (12)

- "So, to the question 'Why can't Indians get with the program?' one might reply that we have already gotten with theirs. Immigrants did not simply reproduce in America the life they had left behind overseas. They adapted instead to the culture they found here, a native culture that was immeasurably old and that still survives today. The latest version of American history tends to describe the meeting of whites and Indian in terms of despoilment, with the Indians getting the worst of it, as indeed occurred. But such accounts can't do justice the thrilling spark of freedom in the encounter - the freedom the Indians had, the freedom that white people found. As surely as Indians gave the world corn and tobacco and potatoes, they gave it a revolutionary new idea of what a human being could be. Thanks to Indians, we learned we didn't have to kneel to George III. In the droning sameness of history, this was front-page  glorious news: we could walk the earth the equal of anyone we met:, no princeling's inferior, unobliged to kiss anyone's hand in subjugation or have anyone kiss ours." (13)

- "Over the next summers, the question of white guys dancing would become one of the most controversial on the reservation. Some traditionalists wanted the tribal council to pass a law banning all non-Indians from sun dances held on Pine Ridge. People who favored open sun dances answered that they would use guns to defend their right to practice their religion with whomever they chose.  At least one respected leader kept his sun dance strictly closed. Some dances were open, others were semi-open but had entrances with many checkpoints at which undesirables could be turned away, others were small and secret and held in remote places where passerby and tourists would never see. A hundred years ago Oglala who continued to practice their traditional ceremonies despite the goverment's ban did so in secret, for fear of white people finding out and shutting them down; today the fear is of white people finding out and wanting to join." (53-54)

- "The most famous removal of Indians, of course, was the removal of the Cherokee from Georgia westward to Indian Territory in 1838 and 1839. There are many accounts of the forced march that came to be known as the Trail of Tears - of the Cherokee's previous peaceableness and prosperity on their lands in Georgia. of the mercilessness of President Andrew Jackson; of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall's ruling that the removal was illegal; of Jackson's response: 'He has made the law. Now let him enforce it.'; of the opposition or people as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Davy Crockett to the removal; of the US soldiers' roundup of the Georgia Cherokee; of the Cherokee's suffering in the stockades and along the trail; of the death of more than four thousand Cherokee, about a third of the population of the tribe, before the removal was through. The Cherokee had their own written language, with an alphabet devised by the Cherokee leader Sequoyah during the 1820s. But their success at following the ways of the whites proved no defense. As would happen again elsewhere, building houses and farms only gave the Indians more to lose when government policy changed." (74-75)

- "Sometimes when I travel in the West - on the Great Plains, especially - I find myself in a place too unimportant for people to pay it much attention nowadays; and yet it's a real place, and unlike any other and specific to itself, and it always makes me wonder what the lost Indian name for it was. Father Buechel's dictionary contains many words for which the object or action or condition described will probably never come up in ordinary conversation again - that is, the word remains, but what it describes has now been forgotten or lost. Will the Sioux ever again have much use for the word tacaka, which means the roof of a buffalo's mouth?" (154)

- "If you ask people nowadays to name a hero, probably they'll say Michael Jordan, or maybe Mother Teresa, or maybe AIDS researcher Dr. Mathildre Krim. In the public sphere, the pickings have become pretty slim. Or else they'll mention someone unknown to the public, or a dedicated teacher they had in high school. The first kind of hero is admired by millions and exists for us mainly through newspapers or on TV. Historically, though, the distinction between the two kind of heroes has been much less clear; that is, in the past a hero to the public at large might also have been someone you know of knew of from you community - someone you would see on the street now and again, an acquaintance, a friend-of-a-friend.

For the Oglala, heroes have always been the first and second kind sumultaneously. Crazy Horse, for example, was just a guy you saw around from time to time, herding his horses, sitting before his lodge, smoking with his friends. And yet he was also... Crazy Horse: the near-magic warrior, the victor of many battles, the man never wounded once in a fight, the famous destroyer of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Our usual experience of heroes today is to divided between the one or the other kind, and so diminished in general, it may be hard to imagine how someone who is both kinds of hero at once can elevate your soul... Or imagine that an older kid you looked up to when you were in elementary school, instead of fading in luster in the usual way as time went on, not only fulfilled every expectation you had for him but surpassed these with glorious public feats you never dreamed of." (198-199)

- "Imagine that the hopefully, innocent, unbounded fantasy you had about someone you really admired when you were a child did not meet the usual puncturing and deflation but simply continued to grow; that you kept it with the same innocence and hope, finding more justification for it every day; that the person you admired, someone as familiar to you as yourself and yet at the same time apart, took the hope invested in her onward into the larger world without a hitch, increasing her fame and achievement and admirers geographically along the way; and imagine that against odds upon odds she won, won at everything important she tried, won so blithely as to hardly show her strength; and that she carried the hope invested in her unstoppably aloft, defying the death and fear in the world. And imagine that as she did this she somehow carried you with her, lifted you, too, above the fear and the death, and gave you and all the people around you someone to be - a self, a freedom, a name. Warfield Moose, Sr., SuAnne's [Big Crow] teacher of Lakota studies at Pine Ridge High School, said of her, 'She showed us a way to live on the earth.'" (199)

- "When SuAnne talked about the reservation, people recall, she sometimes used the metaphor of the basket of crabs. It's a common metaphor on Pine Ridge. She said that the reservation is like a bunch of crabs reaching and struggling to get out of the bottom of a basket, and whenever one of them manages to get a hold and pull himself up the side, the other crabs in their reaching and struggling grab him and pull him back down. The metaphor could apply, no doubt, to many places nearly as poor and lacking in opportunity as Pine Ridge. But somehow it seems even more true here - Oglala society is at once infatuated by and deeply at odds with fame. It creates heroes and tears them down almost simultaneously, as leaders from Red Cloud to Dick Wilson have learned. Perhaps the explanation for that has to to do with the Oglala's free-and-equal view of how people are supposed to be, combined with the general distress the culture has undergone. But if the cause is unknowable, the result is usually pretty clear: the Pine Ridge Reservation is not a comfortable place to be famous in for longer than a week or two." (241)

- "I knew I was almost done working on this book, and as I drove around the reservation or sat at Aurelia's or the Big Crow Center, I was tempted to draw conclusions. Books about Indians often end with an analysis of Indian problems and advice from the author about what Indians could do to improve their lot. Certainly, I could imagine the Oglala's lost improved. I could imagine the tribe growing in numbers and prospering at new enterprises, at least; I could see them staying put as the plains around them continue to lose population, and gaining strength and importance in the region until in a hundred years or so they regain their long-ago stature as a major power in the middle of the continent. Maybe young leaders of SuAnne's generation and the ones that follow will offer the tribe a vision that takes it beyond the hard times of today... As to actual advice for the Oglala, however, I have none. Advice from authors and others - representatives of the church, or officials in the government - usually has not worked out too well in the past. Besides, no Oglala has ever asked me." (276-277)

Best Christian Books List

In order, here is a list of the best Christian books that I have read.

01. CS Lewis - Mere Christianity - quotes from the book
02. St. Therese de Lisieux - Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux - quotes from the book
03. Mother Teresa - Come Be My Light
04. St. Louis de Montfort - True Devotion to Mary
05. CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
06. Scott Hahn - Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism
07. Christopher West - Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution
08. GK Chesteron - Orthodoxy
09. Matthew Kelly - Rediscovering Catholicism: Journeying Toward Our Spiritual North Star
10. CS Lewis - The Great Divorce
11. Scott Hahn - Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God
12. Peggy Noonan - John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father
13. John Eldridge - Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul
14. CS Lewis - The Four Loves


Of course, there are also book on my list to be read. In no particular order, here are the Christian books that I am most excited about reading:
- Joseph Ratzinger - Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration
- GK Chesteron - Saint Thomas Aquinas - 'The Dumb Ox'
- George Weigel - Letters to a Young Catholic (Art of Mentoring)
- St. Augustine - Confessions
- Pope John Paul II - Love and Responsibility
- Pope John Paul II - Crossing the Threshold of Hope