Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

A good title is the title of a successful book.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

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.

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.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

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

Spielberg, Steven

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

Sandwell, B. K.

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Wycherley, William

10.

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

11.

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

Brookner, Anita

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

14.

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

Luther, Martin

15.

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

Kempis, Thomas

16.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

17.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Benjamin, Walter

18.

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

Dane, Frank

19.

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

Hugo, Victor

20.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

22.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is pleasure beyond compare.

Kenko, Yoshida

27.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Hope, Anthony

32.

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

Locke, John

33.

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

Forster, Edward M.

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

More, Hannah

36.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Chambers, Oswald

37.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

38.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

42.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

43.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Socrates

44.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Moliere

45.

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

Blackie, Professor

46.

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

Whitman, Walt

47.

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

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo