Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

- Choate, Rufus

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

Mencken, H. L.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Eco, Umberto

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

11.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

12.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

13.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

The book you don't read won't help.

Rohn, Jim

15.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

16.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

17.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

18.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

19.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

20.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

21.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

22.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Kempis, Thomas

23.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

24.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

25.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Geneen, Harold S.

26.

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

Twain, Mark

27.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

28.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Terry, Helen

29.

In science read the newest works, in literature read the oldest.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

30.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

31.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

32.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Fadiman, Clifton

34.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Rostand, Jean

36.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Spielberg, Steven

38.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

39.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

41.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Tsvetaeva, Marina

42.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

43.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

45.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Twain, Mark

46.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

47.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

49.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine -- but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Keith, Sir Arthur

50.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt