Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

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

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, --you might as well take the book along with them; --one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; --he steps forth like a bridegroom, --bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Sterne, Laurence

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

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

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

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.

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

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

Barstow, Stan

10.

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

11.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

12.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

13.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Samuel, Herbert

14.

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

Brown, Les

15.

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

Rohn, Jim

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Dawkins, John

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

Murray, William

20.

What is important is not to be able to read rapidly, but to be able to decide what not to read.

Mccay, James T.

21.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Camus, Albert

27.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Chambers, Robert

28.

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

30.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

34.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

Proverb, American

35.

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

Rohn, Jim

36.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

37.

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.

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

40.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

41.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

43.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

44.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

45.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

46.

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

Harington, John

47.

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

48.

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

Lee, Spike

49.

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

50.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

Bach, Richard