There's a reason that classic literature is taught to us in school decades after it was written. The Classics are full of profound and powerful sentences.
These novels are goldmines for beautiful wording and truth bombs that you might not expect. Hopefully, these quotes will make you want to actually read the books you sparknoted in class.
1. “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 | Harper Lee
2. "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing."
Moby Dick | Herman Melville
3. “The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”
Ulysses | James Joyce
4. “It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about.”
Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy
5. “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck
6. "Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë
7. “Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.”
Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift
8. “The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. “That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain
11. “And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck
12. “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett
13. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou
>14. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
Little Women | Louisa May Alcott
15. “[A]nything worth dying for… is certainly worth living for.”
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller
16. “We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
17. “Terror made me cruel.”
Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
18. "Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."
Frankenstein | Mary Shelley
19. "We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."
A Room With a View | E.M. Forster
20. “The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.”
Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen
21. “Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.”
Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens
22. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger
23. “I don't think..." then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter.”
Alice in Wonderland | Lewis Caroll
24. "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
The Scarlet Letter | Natha
