Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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.

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Williams, Bert

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

Wilde, Oscar

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

Jones, Charles ''Tremendous''

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

Pound, Ezra

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

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

10.

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

11.

There is no robber worse than a bad book.

Proverb, Italian

12.

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

13.

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

Pascal, Blaise

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

A novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

Carey, Joyce

16.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

Bury, Richard De

17.

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

Barstow, Stan

18.

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

19.

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

Camus, Albert

20.

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

21.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

24.

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

25.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Porter, Noah

26.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Chambers, Oswald

27.

My books kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon.

Hood, Thomas

28.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Hugo, Victor

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.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

31.

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

32.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

33.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

34.

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

Lee, Spike

35.

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

Maclennan, Hugh

36.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

37.

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

38.

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

39.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Benson, Arthur Christopher

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

45.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

46.

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

47.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

48.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Bennett, Arnold

49.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Joubert, Joseph

50.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson