Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Maclennan, Hugh

Read good, big important things.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Calano, Jimmy

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Forster, Edward M.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Hazlitt, William

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

10.

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

11.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

14.

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

Wycherley, William

15.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Pound, Ezra

16.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Kingsley, Charles

22.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

23.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

24.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

25.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

27.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Adler, Mortimer J.

28.

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

32.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

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

34.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Woolf, Virginia

35.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Aubrey, John

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

40.

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

Rohn, Jim

41.

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

Gibbon, Edward

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

Luther, Martin

45.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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.

47.

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

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

Dawkins, John

49.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Day, Clarence

50.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Balfour, Arthur James