In Civilization VI, the game's audio files contain 46 unused quotes for 
Great Works of Writing. Some quotes are for completely new Great Works; others are alternate quotes for existing ones.
| Writer | Great Work of Writing | Quote |
|---|---|---|
| George Sand | François le Champi | "A masterpiece is nothing but an attempt that turned out well." |
| Olympe de Gouges | Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen | "If a woman has a right to be executed, she should also have a right to address the parliament." |
| William Shakespeare | Macbeth | "Double double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble." |
| Jane Austen | Emma | "Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way." |
| John Steinbeck | East of Eden | "I have no bent towards God, but I have a new love for that glittering instrument: the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe, it is always attacked and never destroyed. Because, thou mayest." |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath | "There ain't no sin, and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do." |
| Sigrid Undset | Kristin Lavransdatter | "Feelings of longing seemed to burst from her heart. They ran in all directions, like streams of blood, seeking out paths to all the places in the wide landscape where she had lived, to all her sons roaming through the world, to all her dead, lying under the Earth." |
| Sigrid Undset | The Master of Hestviken | "And she felt joy bubbling up in her heart, that the world was so full of sunshine, and beauty, and gladness. And she had put herself outside it, banished herself to her corner." |
| Agatha Christie | The Mysterious Affair at Styles | "You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely." |
| Agatha Christie | The Secret Adversary | "A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves." |
| Karen Blixen | Seven Gothic Tales | "For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide." |
| Karen Blixen | Out of Africa | "If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back. Of the plows and the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?" |
| Sappho | Hymn to Aphrodite | "Come then now, dear goddess, and release me from my anguish. All my heart's desiring grant thou now. Now too again as aforetime, be thou my ally." |
| Sappho | Fragment 102 | "Sweet mother, I can sing no more today. And all for a youth who has stolen my heart away." |
| Ziauddin Barani | Fatwa-i-Jahandari | "Religion and temporal government are twins. That is, the head of religion and the head of government are twin brothers." |
| Ziauddin Barani | Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi | "By the blessing of God, favorable seasons and abundance of the necessaries of life prevailed in the reign of Firuz Shah, not only in the capital, but throughout his dominions." |
| Dante Alighieri | Inferno | "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." |
| Dante Alighieri | Paradiso | "They transcend our intellect, as the sun's wraith of feeble vision." |
| Alexandre Dumas | The Three Musketeers | "All for one, one for all." |
| Alexandre Dumas | The Count of Monte Cristo | "I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride." |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Good-Bye | "Goodbye, proud world, I'm going home. Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine." |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The Sphinx | "Through a thousand voices spoke the universal dame: 'Who telleth one of my meanings, is master of all I am.'" |
| Virginia Woolf | Mrs Dalloway | "Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred." |
| Virginia Woolf | A Room of One's Own | "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." |
| Chinua Achebe | Things Fall Apart | "He was a man of action, a man of war. On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head." |
| Chinua Achebe | Arrow of God | "In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows, but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace." |
| Ernest Hemingway | The Old Man and the Sea | "I may not be as strong as I think but I know many tricks and I have resolution." |
| Ernest Hemingway | The Sun Also Rises | "I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it." |
| Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." |
| Charles Dickens | A Christmas Carol | "And so as Tiny Tim observed, 'God blesses everyone.'" |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment | "Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart." |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Brothers Karamazov | "For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for." |
| Beatrix Potter | The Tale of Peter Rabbit | "After a time he began to wander about, going lippity - lippity - not very fast, and looking all around." |
| Beatrix Potter | The Tailor of Gloucester | "When the Cathedral clock struck twelve there was an answer — like an echo of the chimes — and Simpkin heard it, and came out of the tailor's door, and wandered about in the snow." |
| Beatrix Potter | The Tailor of Gloucester | "Out stepped a little gentleman mouse, and made a bow to the tailor. And out from under tea-cups and from under bowls and basins, stepped other and more little mice, who hopped away down off the dresser and under the wainscot." |
| Valmiki | The Ramayana | "In all this world, I pray thee, who is virtuous? Heroic? True?" |
| Valmiki | The Ramayana | "O Brahmá, mighty by thy grace, Rávan, who rules the giant race, that God nor demon e'er should kill, his charmed life, for so thy will." |
| Valmiki | Yoga Vasistha | "It is the ignorant only, that set their minds to the worthless things of this world. But he who takes these things as nothing, remains free from the pleasure and pain of having or not having them." |
| Valmiki | Yoga Vasistha | "He who worships the universal soul that resides in all beings, as the one self-same and undivided spirit; is released from the doom of repeated births." |
| Rumi | Divani Shamsi Tabriz | "And when I feel like my joy is absolute, and I will never be as lucky as I am, love makes me suffer all over again." |
| Rumi | Divani Shamsi Tabriz | "Love's way is all loneliness and drunkenness. For the torrent runs down. How should it run upward?" |
| Rumi | Masnavi | "Oh great camel, said the mouse, to you this river might be an ant, but to me it is a dragon." |
| Gabriela Mistral | Sonetos de la Muerte | "One day, this long weariness will be greater, and the soul will tell the body that it doesn't wish to continue dragging its mass along the frosted road to where the men go, content to live." |
| Gabriela Mistral | Sonetos de la Muerte | "From the icy niche the men put you in, I will lay you to rest in the humble and sun-drenched earth." |
| Gabriela Mistral | Readings for Women | "But in a book of 'Readings for Women', not everything has to be domestic commentary and lullabies. It would also be a mistake if, due to her specializing in the education of the young, to belittle her, denying her the great human issues, those that touch her just as much as any man: social justice, work, nature" |
| Gabriela Mistral | La Lluvia Lenta | "The tree and the wind are quiet, and in the stupendous silence, these clear and bitter tears keep falling." |