Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Tupper, Martin

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

Ruskin, John

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Dane, Frank

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

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

10.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

11.

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

12.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Asimov, Isaac

13.

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

Fuller, Margaret

14.

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

15.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Rohn, Jim

16.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Temple, Sir William

17.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.

Steele, Sir Richard

18.

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.

19.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

20.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

26.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

27.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

28.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Faulkner, William

29.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Eliot, George

30.

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

31.

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

Sandwell, B. K.

32.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in it.

Byron, Lord

33.

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

Adler, Mortimer J.

34.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

35.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

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

Rohn, Jim

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Leacock, Stephen B.

40.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

41.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Camus, Albert

42.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

43.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

44.

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

Blackie, Professor

45.

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

46.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Twain, Mark

47.

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

Barrett, E.S.

48.

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

49.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor is any pleasure so lasting.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

50.

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