Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

- Benet, Stephen Vincent

Best Quotes about Books - reading

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.

Barrow

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Morely, John

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Gibbon, Edward

10.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

11.

This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

Parker, Dorothy

12.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Steiner, George

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

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

Jackson, Holbrook

15.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

16.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

19.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Erasmus, Desiderius

22.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

Johnson

23.

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

24.

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

Phelps, William Lyon

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Dawkins, John

28.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

29.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

30.

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

31.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Books succeed, and lives fail.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

35.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

37.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

Crane, Frank

38.

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

39.

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

41.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Johnson, Samuel

42.

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

Wycherley, William

43.

In any situation, ask yourself: What strengths do I possess that can contribute towards accomplishing something in this situation? Then follow through.

44.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

45.

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

46.

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

47.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

48.

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.

49.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

50.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry