Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

- Adler, Mortimer J.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Disney, Walt

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

10.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

11.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

Wycherley, William

12.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

16.

A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Steinbeck, John

17.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

18.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

McKenna, Richard

19.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

20.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Hardwick, Elizabeth

21.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

25.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Fuller, Margaret

26.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

Hope, Anthony

27.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

28.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

29.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

Jackson, Holbrook

30.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

31.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

32.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

35.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

36.

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

37.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Rohn, Jim

38.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

39.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

40.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

41.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books.

Sinyavsky, Andre

42.

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

43.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Barrie, Sir James M.

44.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Wesley, John

45.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

49.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

50.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Thoreau, Henry David