Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

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

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Thurber, James

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Rohn, Jim

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

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

11.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

12.

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

13.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

14.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

Davies, Paul

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Milton, John

18.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

19.

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.

20.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

21.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

22.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Colton, Charles Caleb

23.

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Secondat, Charles de

24.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

West, Jessamyn

25.

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

Baker, Nicholson

26.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

27.

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

Kempis, Thomas

28.

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

Carey, Joyce

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

Blackie, Professor

31.

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

Coolio

32.

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.

33.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Miller, Henry

34.

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

Lee, Spike

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

40.

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

Brookner, Anita

41.

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

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

47.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

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

Byron, Lord

49.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

50.

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