Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.

- Barstow, Stan

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Whitman, Walt

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

Barrett, E.S.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Tupper, Martin

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Mccosh

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

10.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

11.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

You will be the same person in five as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

13.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

14.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

16.

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

Wycherley, William

17.

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

18.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Dane, Frank

20.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

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.

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

23.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Marx, Groucho

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

Rosenbach, A. S. W.

29.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal blocks or bites of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental picture and entertainment-not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant.

Cutler, Wade E.

31.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

32.

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

33.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

34.

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Davies, Robertson

35.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

Ruskin, John

39.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Collier, Jeremy

41.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

42.

Read nothing that you do not care to remember, and remember nothing you do not mean to use.

Blackie, Professor

43.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

44.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Miller, Henry

47.

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Hugo, Victor

48.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

49.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

50.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry